I am in London as I write this, sitting in a lover’s flat overlooking the London city skyline. I was here when I learned the news of the 2024 Presidential election—that hate won over love, bigotry over compassion, spite over benevolence.
I understand the sick despair many of us feel in the pit of our stomach right now. Dark times hover on the horizon. I don’t believe the people who voted so resoundingly against the better angels of our nature realize yet what they’ve done. Some of them likely never will, and for those who do, it will be too late.
I’m not here to analyze what happened, or rail against the stubborn streak of vicious, ugly racist misogyny that has long been part of the American spirit. Others are already doing that, some of them quite eloquently, and I do believe there’s value in understanding what happened, but that is not the most important thing right now.
It’s vital to understand going forward, though I think the answer is grubber, more sordid, and more banal than we might otherwise hope: there has always been this vicious streak of mean-spirited, ugly anti-intellectualism embedded deep in the American national character, that has been with us from the start. It has never changed, and it likely never will in our lifetimes. We are simultaneously the land of can-do optimism and sleazy, seedy execration. These are the two faces of the American civic character, and this week, the ignorance won.
But I want to remind everyone reading this that there is hope. Like the dawning of the sun after a night of terror, this too shall pass.
I do not wish to trivialize what is to come. Many people will suffer. My trans and nonbinary friends are terrified right now. Two nights ago, a great many decent Americans discovered just how badly their country hates them, just how deep the ugly river of xenophobia flows through the American psyche.
There will be suffering. There will be blood. There will be ugliness, and violence, and hopelessness, and despair. I do not want to minimize any of the grotesqueries we all see on the horizon.
I will, instead, invite us all to take a deep breath, and remember that the course of history is neither straight nor smooth, but it does tend, in the long term, toward peace and justice.
We have been here before. We have, as a nation, been worse before. We were built on the foundation of slavery and we have never truly stepped away from it. Yet we have made progress, and we will again. It might not seem like it now, but this is a setback, not the end of all things.
I would especially like to remind those of us who feel most betrayed by our fellow citizens, those who voted against their own interests purely out of spite and desire to hurt, not to do the oppressor’s work for him.
I still remember the first time this country elevated this vicious, narcissistic, racist, sexist, conman, this tumor on the American psyche, to the highest office the first time. I remember how the shockwaves echoed through my own personal life, how a person I once loved became a bitter, angry, sullen echo of herself, how she told me directly that she was abrasive and prickly to me simply because, in her words, she felt overwhelmed with hopelessness and despair, and I was the only safe place for her to dump that poisonous emotional sewage.
I learned only a few days ago from a person in my life I love dearly that there’s a name for this. It’s called “lateral violence.” Those who feel oppressed, who feel ground down by an enemy far too dangerous and powerful to fight, release their anger and fear and frustration on one another, tearing into each other with a viciousness that it is not safe to direct outward.
Many of us will do that over the coming year. I would like to invite us all not to do the oppressors’ work for them, not to become a participant in our own subjugation.
This has always been a peculiar and pernicious weakness of those of us on the progressive side, this tendency to turn on our own. Tim Minchin expressed this beautifully:
It cannot, it cannot be okay if the intention of progressives—which I assume it is—is progress forward into a future of more empathy and understanding for more people, it cannot be that the primary mechanism by which we’re going to make that progress is the suppression of empathy and understanding for anyone who doesn’t align with our beliefs. It cannot be that unmitigated expression of furious outrage will somehow alchemize into a future of peace and love.
I understand the impulse toward despair and the anger that it brings. I understand that anger, lacking a safe outlet, is all too easily directed at those around us who are like us, those we think have failed the cause, have not done enough to fight oppression (or perhaps have not fought it in the “right” way).
I understand, too, where this leads.
We cannot do this. We must not do this. The story is not over. The storm will end. We must not, in our rage and hopelessness, turn on one another.
Now, more than ever, if we are to survive what is to come, we must, we absolutely must, support each other. That is the way we get through this. Not by adopting the tools and mindset of our enemy, not by doing our enemy’s work for him, not by tearing each other down because we don’t know where else to direct our feelings, but by holding each other, supporting each other, loving each other. Love does not triumph over hate by becoming hate.
The the arc of the moral universe is long, as MLK Jr said, but it bends toward justice.. This path is never as straight nor as swift as we would like, and sometimes for every three steps forward there is one backward.
It’s okay to feel rage, despair, all those other things. I feel them too. We have a choice: we can use them to lift each other up or tear each other down.
I don’t believe in New Years resolutions. But I have, today, this moment, made a resolution for the next four years.
My resolution is that I will do everything in my power to act with greater kindness, greater compassion, greater benevolence and empathy and grace. I will not allow those who despise these things to destroy them in me. I will not do the oppressor’s work for him. I will not be complicit in my own eradication.
JRR Tolkien believed—indeed, this is one of the central moral lessons of his works—that good triumphs over evil not because good is stronger than evil, but because good works with itself while evil works against itself. We do not defeat bullies by becoming bullies ourselves. That, I think, is our blueprint forward.
I’ve posted this image on my blog before. It is vital to remember it now.
NOTE: This blog post was updated on January 25, 2025. Update at end.
If you own a website that uses stock images or even images you’ve taken yourself, beware a scam floating around that tries to trick you into putting links to another site on your pages.
I recently received a phony “DMCA Copyright Infringement Notice” run by a scammer attempting to get backlinks to a site called KnowYourSins, a sex site run by two people named Samuel Davis (@Samueld_KYS on Twitter) and Olivia Moore (@Olivia_kys on Twitter).
The letter claims to come from a law firm called “Commonwealth Legal Services” in Phoenix, Arizona. Here’s a screenshot:
So, the first thing to know about this email is it’s very unusual for a DMCA complaint, which is almost always a takedown request, not a request for a backlink.
The second thing to notice is there’s a standard format for DMCA takedowns, and they must, by law, include:
Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and e-mail address.
A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized.
A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder.
The image itself comes from Unsplash, specifically this one, and it was taken by Eric Lucatero, who has no connection with KnowYourSins dot com.
Huh.
Commonwealth Legal Services
I looked at the website of the supposed “law firm” that sent it, justicesolutionshub.info. Now, the fact that it uses a .info top-level domain immediately set off warning bells in my head as well.
“Zoe Baker” signs this email “Trademark Attorney,” yet the page on justicesolutionshub.info lists “her” as a “business legal consultant.”
Huh.
On top of that, notice anything funny about all these headshots? Look closely.
Yup, they’re all generated by AI—specifically, they all come from This Person Does Not Exist.
How can you tell?
AI deepfake faces generated by This Person Does Not Exist always have eyes in exactly the same place exactly the same size and exactly the same distance apart. It’s a limitation of the adversarial GAN software that creates the fake faces.
You can see it if you stack the faces on top of each other and make them translucent in Photoshop.
I looked up “Commonwealth Legal Services” on Google. It turns out there are a bunch of different websites at different URLs all using the same exact web design with the same copy and the same pictures: justicesolutionshub.info, cwsolutions.biz, elitejusticeadvisors.biz (currently offline), and more.
The front page of justicesolutionshub.info shows a photo of a building. The office building is a stock photo rendering that you can put any logo in front of.
This is an Adobe Photos stock photo rendering created by digital artist “Esin.” A surprising number of phony fly-by-night bogus “companies” use this stock image as their corporate headquarters on their About or Contact pages.
Things really take a turn for the surreal if you put the address of “Commonwealth Legal Services,” 3909 N. 16th Street, Fourth Floor, Phoenix, AZ 85016 into Google Street View. This one weird trick produced results you aren’t going to believe:
Note the conspicuous absence of a fourth floor. As of the time of writing this, the building is currently listed for sale.
Okay, so we have a fake DMCA takedown request from a phony law office attempting to blackmail me into putting a backlink to Know Your Sins from my site.
Know Your Sins
So, what is Know Your Sins?
It’s a more or less generic BDSM information site with precious little in the way of in-depth information, using largely AI-generated content and stock photos.
I can see a couple of possibilities:
Know Your Sins is scamming in a desperate bid to attract backlinks and improve their search engine ranking.
Know Your Sins is a victim; they hired a dodgy “we can boost your search engine ranking” scammer, not knowing that he was engaging in fraud.
I emailed the contact address at Know Your Sins, hello (at) knowyoursins (dot) com, to try to get some insight. So far, as of the time of writing this, I have not received a reply. I will update this blog post if they get back in touch with me.
I’ve also been in touch with several webmasters who have received identical DMCA complaints, at least one of whom was accused of pirating a photo he took, all with demands to link back to Know Your Sins.
The Know Your Sins domain registration is hidden by Privacy protect. I’ve filed a formal complaint with them, since they claim they’ll rescind the privacy protection on sites that engage in spamming or fraud. (I urge anyone who’s received one of these scam emails to do the same using the “report abuse” form here.) If they reply, I’ll post the results.
Isn’t there a penalty for false DMCA takedown requests?
No. Perhaps surprisingly, there isn’t.
There are penalties for impersonating a lawyer, and for fraud. The emails are definitely fraud, and I do not for even half a second believe the person sending them is a lawyer, so there may be avenues of legal action there. I suspect, given that others are reporting these emails but they don’t always demand a link to Know Your Sins (some of them demand links to other sites), that what’s most likely happening is a scammer is selling his services to desperate website owners who want more Google linkbacks but don’t care too much if they’re totally on the up and up.
The lesson here
Genuine DMCA takedown requests must follow a certain specific legal format (including a statement that under penalty of perjury, the person sending the request has a good-faith belief that the claimed infringement is genuine), and don’t ask for linkbacks.
If you get a “DMCA warning” or “DMCA takedown” that asks you to link to another site, you’re being scammed.
If you’ve received one of these fake takedown requests, I’d love to hear from you! I’m in the process of trying to strip the Privacy Protection from the knowyoursins domain registration, and the more examples I have, the better. Please feel free to email me at franklin (at) franklinveaux (dot) com.
UPDATE JANUARY 25, 2025
A lot of people have sent me copies of similar fake DMCA emails demanding linkbacks to knowyoursins dot com. The site is registered at GoDaddy. This morning, I had a long and interesting conversation with a member of the GoDaddy abuse team, who has told me that GoDaddy is opening an investigation into knowyoursins dot com for fraudulent DMCA takedowns and fraudulent backlink farming.
Have you received a “DMCA takedown” demanding a link to knowyoursins dot com? GoDaddy’s abuse team would like to hear from you.
Create a new report, choose the “Phishing” option, and in the details section, put a copy of the fraudulent email you received, with a brief explanation that you are reporting the site for fraudulent DMCA takedowns and fraudulent backlink farming.
And, of course, I’d love to see copies of the fraudulent emails you’ve received.
It all started when I accidentally clicked on Facebook Marketplace.
I was trying to click on my notifications. On the iOS app, the Marketplace button is next to the Notifications button, and, well…
As God is my witness, I do not know why Facebook Marketplace thought I would be interested in a gigantic human-sized pod. I mean, it was absolutely 100% right, but how did it know?
And so it came to pass that I, after much back and forth with the seller (who owns a clinic that was moving, and didn’t have space for it any more) and some absolutely heroic efforts from my friend Stan to move the damn thing, came into possession of a Bod Pod, a medical scanner originally, I gather, designed to calculate body mass.
Of course, when I saw that listing on Facebook on that fateful day, my mind immediately, as it is wont to do, went to images of the alien eggs from the Alien movies.
What if, thought I, I could cover this Bod Pod in silicone, making an alien egg large enough for a person? And what if, I continued as my brain inevitably rode this train to the last station, I could make a whole bunch of gigantic silicone tentacles—say, just for the sake of argument, nine and a hald feet long or so—that might explode from the pod, dripping with slime, trying to drag a Helpless Victim™ into the egg-thing? And what if, I continued on, having at this point reached the last station, crashed through the wall, and sailed on into the Beyond Space where anything is possible, I did a photo shoot, in which this poor Helpless Victim™ was molested by tentacles from this giant alien pod?
Now, of course, getting from pod to giant alien egg with tentacles is a Project, one I have only just barely embarked upon.
The first step to a pod with tentacles is, of course, the pod. The second step is the tentacles, and so it was, Gentle Reader, that I set about designing a Giant Tentacle in a 3D modeling program.
From this Giant Tentacle, I created a mold that could be printed in 15-inch segments, which is the maximum print size on my 3D printer, with an overall length of over 9 feet.
Of course, I didn’t really quite imagine how long a 9-foot mold is, so it turned out that once the mold was complete—something that took days of printing—I didn’t have enough space for it without rearranging furniture.
Seriously, nine-feet-plus of mold is more mold than you think it is.
It’s also a lot harder to cast silicone in an open-face mold this size than I expected it to be. Like, a lot harder. In this much space, silicone doesn’t behave the way you’d expect it to. It’s kind of like lava—it doesn’t flow to fill the entire mold. (It doesn’t help that my vacuum chamber also isn’t big enough to degas this much silicone all at once, either.)
So I had to make the pour in a bunch of steps, which created all sorts of weird problems. I’d planned to have the suckers lighter than the rest, with bands of color through the tentacles. That…didn’t work. The coloring pigment actually migrated up through the silicone, something it doesn’t do in a smaller mold.
The mold is just a liiiiitle teensy bit more than half the diameter of the tentacle, so it just barely starts to pinch inward at the top. This is so that I could cast half the tentacle, remove it from the mold, fill it with silicone again, then put the half I’d already cast on top, and that slight bit of pinch would grab the bit I’d already cast.
The result worked out pretty well, though it uses a lot of silicone—I made two tentacles, and together they’re about $100 worth of body-safe platinum-cure silicone alone, not including the cost of printing the mold.
When I flew to Springfield to see my Talespinner, I brought the tentacles (of course), which caused some degree of consternation at TSA (of course). We trialled the tentacles as a means of violation of Helpless Victims™, at which they excelled, but we (by which I mean she and her other lover, as I looked on) also gave them a try as an impact toy, at which they also excelled.
In fact, this may be the thuddiest impact toy ever conceived by man, more thuddy even than the Dread Koosh Flogger, a flogger made (as the name suggests) from Koosh balls.
I’m considering making an impact tentacle toy that’s basically a short length of this tentacle with a handle on the end.
When I returned from Springfield, armed with more information to allow the Great Tentacle Pod Project to move forward, I unpacked my suitcase and tossed the tentacles over the pod, lacking a better place to put them (and nine-foot tentacles are both heavier and take up more storage space than you may realize).
It struck me yesterday that visitors to my home, upon walking into my living room and seeing this, might be subject to some discomfiture.
Imagine the scene: It’s late at night. A Beautiful Young Woman has just had a fight with her Wretched Boyfriend at a nightclub, and is walking home through the bad part of town, an industrial park fallen on hard times, now the home of shuttered businesses and derelict warehouses.
A meteor streaks across the sky, growing larger and larger, until it crashes through the roof of an abandoned warehouse, now crumbling into ruin. Curious, the Beautiful Young Woman investigates, but soon finds herself in trouble when the alien drones spring from the dark recesses of the abandoned warehouse and drag her before the Alien Queen, which has hauled itself from the still-smoking spacecraft. The Alien Queen sprouts a mass of wet, slimy tentacles that violate the helpless Beautiful Young Woman in ways far too shocking to describe in this blog entry, lest you, Gentle Reader, pass out from the vapors, giving her ecstasy beyond anything she has ever known before until at last, delirious, she is overcome and loses her senses.
She wakes some time later, driven by a gnawing hunger more powerful than anything she’s ever known before, an insatiable sexual need that drives her from the warehouse in search of prey. For you see, she is now host to an Alien Parasite, a creature that fills her with need, driving her to mate with all who cross her path, spreading the alien seed as she does. The parasite lives deep within her ladybits, granting unspeakable ecstasy to all with whom she copulates but denying her pleasure herself, as she roves the town in a frenzy of frantic, unnatural lust.
From this fantasy, spun by my Talespinner and me in a late-night sexting session, came our newest foray into weird sex toys from a realm beyond imagination: Project Ladybug.
“What if,” thought I, “I could actually make an alien that lived within her ladybits?” Picture something like a soft silicone fleshlight masturbator, designed to be worn vaginally, with a sinister alien opening and tentacles that wrap around her legs, holding it in place. It would grant great pleasure to those who have sex with the Beautiful Young Woman™ so afflicted, whilst denying her of any pleasure herself, so as to keep the fires of her lust unslaked.
This is Project Ladybug, and it comes after the first successful test of the nine-foot tentacle project.
So it was that when I was in Springfield two weeks ago visiting my Talespinner that we set about turning Project Ladybug into reality.
The idea was a sex toy exactly custom-fit to her internal anatomy, that would keep her nicely filled when the Alien Parasite was within her, so the first step was making a cast of her inside bits.
I thought this would be fairly easy. Slip in a female condom, fill her with dental alginate to the point she was properly full, wait for it to set, then remove it, make a 3D scan of it, and use that as the basis for the stroker. 3D print a model of the stroker, cast it in super-soft silicone…what could be simpler, right?
Ah, if only.
I ordered some alginate and, because alginate soon crumbles and is not very durable, some casting material to make a mold of the alginate, so that if it didn’t survive the trip home, I could cast her internal bits in silicone and 3D scan that.
Armed with casting materials and a female condom, we set about the first bit, which quickly proved more difficult than we anticipated.
You’d think it would be easy. Lie your model on her back, slip in the female condom, fill with alginate, wait a couple minutes, and Bob’s your uncle.
In practice, the first two efforts met with failure, because the alginate (a) sets way too fast (even if you get medium-set material) and (b) comes gushing back out, and (c) the entrance to the typical hoo-ha is soft and pliable enough that the casting won’t stay centered.
However, my Talespinner came up with the idea of using a canning funnel to…um, provide structural stability at the vaginal entrance, and I used cold water to mix the third batch of alginate to slow setting…
…which meant she had time to play on her phone whilst it set…
…et voilà!
At this point, we had a (quite fragile) alginate representation of her internal anatomy. It was difficult and expensive enough to make, and the flight home fraught enough (I’d broken my suitcase on a previous trip to a convention, and so had flown out to see her with only a duffel bag), that I was paranoid, so I used a 3D scan program on my phone to make a quick, dirty 3D scan of the cast in case it was damaged on the trip home.
I shan’t bore you with the details of exactly what a PITA that turned out to be, except to say that it needed a place with (a) bright light that (b) I could move around in three dimensions (c) with a background that wouldn’t confuse the phone, so I ended up hanging her ladycast by a string from the ceiling fan in the middle of the living room with a sheet wrapped around, which is just as ridiculous and surreal as it sounds.
Anyway, emergency backup 3D scan made, it was time to make a cast, in the event the alginate didn’t survive the trip home.
I cast it right up to the midline, let the material set, sprayed it with mold release agent, then did a second pour to cast it full.
That created an entirely new problem.
Enter the TSA
I flew back to Portland with the cast, and a nine-foot-long silicone tentacle, and a four-foot-long silicone tentacle, in my carry-on luggage.
These things created no small measure of consternation at security.
The finished cast looked like this:
The X-ray looked…bizarre. (I really, really wish TSA would let me take pictures of the X-ray screens when I travel, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.)
They pulled my bag, as you would expect. They asked me many questions about the solid lump of heavy cement in my bag, as you’d expect. They swabbed it for explosives, as you’d expect.
Then they shut down the security checkpoint and called every single TSA agent over to examine the block of cement, which I did not expect.
They swabbed it for explosives again, using a different technique, one I didn’t even know they had.
They called a supervisor.
The supervisor comes over, glances at the X-ray, says “oh, I know what that is,” and waves me through.
As God is my witness, I really, really want to know what he thought it was. Because I can think of only two possibilities:
He had no idea what it was, but he thought he did, in which case I will confess I am super curious about what he believed it was; or
He knew exactly what it was, in which case he seems the sort of person I should get to know.
Upon arriving home, I faced yet another problem:
The mold release agent I put between the layers of the cast didn’t work.
Now I have a solid lump of cement with Kitty’s kitty trapped within, and freeing it is proving a nightmare. Half an hour of hard work with a hacksaw succeeded only in getting this far:
It may yet come to pass that I reconstruct Kitty’s kitty in a 3D program from the phone-generated scan and the photos I took. (I took a ton of photos, with a measuring tape for scale.)
In any event, Project Ladybug is proceeding apace, and at some point in the not to distant future I plan to have a monstrous alien parasite custom-fit to my Talespinner’s ladybits (for you see, the name Ladybug came from an autocorrect fail of “ladybits”) that will attach itself to her, driving her to a frenzy of unspeakable, insatiable alien lust.
Because if you’re going to make freaky sex toys, I think it’s time to move beyond “fantasy penises of supernatural creatures.”
Okay, so. It’s thousands of years in the future. A global calamity has caused civilization to collapse. The population cratered to less than a billion people. Modern technological infrastructure was wiped out: power generation, mining, logistics, everything.
Eventually humanity recovered, up to a point. Right now, in the real world, all the world’s near-surface deposits of metals, oil, and most minerals are depleted; a society that lost modern infrastructure would no longer be able to mine iron, find or use oil and other petrochemicals, coal, and so on.
Metals in the fictional society still exist, though in limited quantities. They have to be “mined” from landfills, and the capacity to smelt steel without coal or oil is highly limited. Fortunately, landfills are largely anaerobic environments, so metals would still exist in unoxidized states, but can you imagine trying to smelt anything useable from, say, a stainless steel oven or a car frame without coal or oil?
No oil means limited plastics. Firearms exist, but without modern machining they’re quite crude compared to modern firearms. Computers? No. Electrical power in large quantities? No.
Thing is, the knowledge to make these things still exists; it isn’t lost. Many books and so forth survive (though not, obviously, computer records). People would know how electricity works, how to smelt high-quality steel, and so on; it’s just that without ores, without coal, without oil except for plant oils, it’s difficult to do on a large scale.
So: Horses and carts are the predominant non-pedestrian travel. Simple firearms exist but not in mass-produced, industrial quantities. It’s a weird society: technologically backward but with full knowledge of what has been lost.
My question relates specifically to military doctrine and combat tactics.
Horse-mounted calvary and foot soldiers, armed with swords and mmmmaybe simple cartridge firearms brings to mind, say, Revolutionary War or Civil War tactics…but in this world, the knowledge of modern combined arms tactics, military doctrine, and small-unit tactics still exists, it wasn’t lost, only the technological infrastructure was lost.
So, what would military units look like? What would military tactics and strategy look like? Definitely not Civil War, but not modern either. How would industrial military techniques and doctrine adopt to that level of technological infrastructure?
(This blog post originally started life as an answer on Quora.)
With men like Andrew Tate and his little Tater Tots making noise about the proper role of Alpha Men™ in modern society, I thought it might be useful to recap the rules for Alpha Men™ in today’s complex world.
An alpha male waits for the train. Image by Shekai.
Like all pre-release products, alpha men are likely to be unstable and are typically lacking essential features. It’s important, therefore, to keep alpha men in the proper environment, to prevent unwanted problems. Some things to keep in mind:
Alpha men are not suitable for public release. They should be used only by production teams and QA, and should not be introduced to the general public.
Alpha men may not be secure and may have multiple vulnerabilities. Keep them away from any internet-facing system, because they may be easy to exploit.
Alpha men should be assumed to be unstable. When presenting an alpha man in public, please verify the commands and processes you will be demonstrating in a controlled environment to avoid embarrassing crashes or lack of functionality in front of an audience.
Alpha men do not have all the features you expect from a man who is ready for release. Expect to find significant areas where basic features have not yet been implemented.
Document all crashes or unexpected behavior so that the developers can address it.
Do not expect your alpha man to be resilient or to be able to process unexpected input. Provide only properly formatted input that the alpha man expects. The alpha man may not be able to respond to unexpected or ambiguous data gracefully.
Alpha men are quite fragile and may not have error handling implemented. Expect hard crashes and/or complete shutdown if an error condition is encountered.
Under no circumstances whatsoever should any alpha man be used in any mission critical environment where reliability or proper behavior are crucial, including any environment where failure of the alpha man may result in loss of life, significant damage to equipment, or corruption of important business data.
Alpha men are not certified for access to internal networks without sandboxing and firewalling.
Log all defects you observe in your alpha man so they may be addressed before release.
Before I get into this, a bit of background is necessary. The Alien movie franchise holds a special place in my…um, heart? Psyche? Nightmare cellar? Something like that.
I was, you see, a huge fan of Star Wars. I saw the original in the theater on opening night when I was eleven, and it blew me away. For years after, I was absolutely obsessed with all things Star Wars.
So it came to pass that when Alien was released, my parents, thinking oh, it’s a science fiction movie about space, he likes science fiction movies about space,” took me to see it. I must’ve been…I don’t remember. Thirteen, maybe?
I had nightmares about the alien in Alien for the next thirty years. No exaggeration. This is, in fact, why my wife suggested that I make a xenomorph facehugger sex toy; she loves pushing my buttons so.
You can imagine, then, what a disappointment Prometheus and Alien: Covenant were. What all the movies after Aliens were, to be fair.
I went to see Alien: Romulus with my Talespinner, for I am not so foolish as to see an Alien movie by myself lest I have nightmares for another thirty years. My expectations were, to be polite, tempered by the catastrophes that were the prequels, but I came away generally favorably impressed.
So, without further ado:
I don’t recall this exact image in the movie, but my, it gives me ideas. Where is the tail, I wonder? I bet I can make something like this…
First, the spoiler-free overview:
Alien: Romulus is, thankfully, not Alien: Covenant.
Is it worth watching? Yes. Yes, it is. It a solid, if uninspired (more on that later), addition to the franchise. It’s flawed, and it’s unlikely to become a classic the way the first two movies did, but it is a good, entertaining movie.
This movie understands what an Alien movie is supposed to be. It gets right what the prequels and the movies after Aliens get wrong.
And it’s gorgeous. The cinematography is just…wow. You ever watch one of those movies where you can hit Pause on any frame and what you see on the screen looks like a work of art? That’s Alien: Romulus.
Acid blood in zero G is a big, big problem…
The casting is very well done. Special shout-out to David Jonsson as “Andy,” the scrapped-and-salvaged artificial person (not a spoiler, we learn that near the beginning of the movie):
He plays a challenging role part pitch-perfect, and holds his own against Lance Hendrickson’s Bishop in Aliens.
And before you ask, yes, it did give me nightmares, which Prometheus and Alien: Covenant did not. So mission accomplished, I suppose?
Eunice and I, for those who may have missed it, released a new novel earlier this month, London Under Veil. It’s a departure for us (though to be fair that happens often; we can’t seem to find a genre and stick to it)—a sexy contemporary urban fantasy that follows a coven of spellcasting sex workers in their secret underground war with Objectivist Tory rage mages on the eve of Brexit.
We launched the book at WorldCon Glasgow, and sold out by Saturday morning. The first printing is completely gone.
Since then, I’ve received a surprising number of emails, DMs, and Facebook Messenger messages asking if there will be a sequel. Honestly, you guys are amazing, I’m so glad the book has resonated with so many folks!
The answer is yes. We’re working on the second novel in the Guild and City series, working title London Falling, right now.
In honor of all the people asking if there will be a second novel, I’d like to offer up this teaser, from the first draft of the still-in-progress sequel:
Eventually, the door opened. A bald man in a white shirt, sleeveless and sweat-stained, glared out at them. “I don’t imagine you’ll just go away if I ask you to?” he growled.
“I’d prefer not to,” Serene said. “We’ve travelled quite a distance.”
He paused for a moment, his expression sour, then his face changed, as though he’d reached some sort of decision. “Suppose you might as well c’mon up, then.” He turned and climbed a steep set of narrow, worn wooden steps. Serene followed him up. May hesitated, then climbed after her. Lillian and Iris followed. Iris shut the door, plunging them into gloom.
The steps ascended for longer than what seemed, strictly speaking, reasonable. Bare lightbulbs overhead cast a dim yellow glow that didn’t seem to illuminate the stairs so much as provide opportunity for shadows to gather. May frowned. A tingle swept over her skin. The acrid scent of ozone stung her nose.
The stairs ended, an entirely unnatural distance from the long-vanished entrance, at a small landing, before a massive wooden door carved with intricate reliefs of men and women cavorting lecherously beneath the boughs of an enormous tree. It swung open silently, into a penthouse suite lavish beyond the dreams of decadence. Luxurious white carpet covered the floor. To one side, a long bar, lit by glowing neon, ran the length of the wall. Bottles of exotic liquors, some with labels that seemed to twist the eye, lined up on shelves of dark polished wood. Along the other wall, huge windows that May couldn’t quite imagine belonging to the shabby industrial building looked toward the New York skyline. Three shallow steps descended into a large rectangular pit in the centre of the room, occupied by the largest sectional couch May had ever seen. A small round fireplace of brass-coloured metal squatted in the centre of the sectional, filling the space with warmth and light from a cheerful fire.
The man, Sam, turned to face them. May blinked. She’d somehow expected to see a stereotypical American, a middle-aged man with a paunch but no hair, in a grungy, sweaty tank top that whose best days were well behind it, and hadn’t been particularly good even then. Instead, a tall, slender man with long flowing hair and eyes the colour of honey, features as beautiful and androgynous as a Renaissance painting, scowled back at her. When she thought back, he’d always looked this way; why had she imagined anything else?
“Serene,” he said in a voice that carried Arctic frost. “I wish I could say this is an unexpected pleasure. It’s certainly unexpected, at any rate. Why you, of all people, might possibly believe you would find welcome here is beyond—oh, hey, Iris!”
“Sam!” Iris squealed. She flung herself forward, past Lillian and a gobsmacked May, to throw her arms around him. He embraced her warmly.
May’s jaw dropped. Lillian burst into laughter. Serene lifted an eyebrow. “Okay,” Lillian said, once Iris had release him. “I have got to hear this story.”
“A bit before your time,” Iris said. “Hey, Serene, you remember that infosec conference you sent me to in Glasgow, right after I started working for you? You know the one, securing private networks against intrusion? Defence in depth for network-facing servers?”
Serene folded her arms. “I have some vague memory of that, yes.”
“I met Sam there! He was brushing up on design of low-latency content delivery networks for streaming media.”
“And the rest is history,” Sam said. “Iris gave me her email—”
“Of course she did,” Serene said.
“—and we stayed in touch. I’m glad to see you’re keeping a better class of company these days, Serene.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m really necessary at all,” Serene said.
“Humble, too.” Sam looked her up and down with his strange eyes. “One almost might wonder if you’re the same Serene I know and love—well, I know so well. I’m less familiar with your other companions.”
His gaze met May’s. A physical jolt ran up her back. She found herself falling into his eyes, like pools of shimmering gold. A long slow flush passed through her body, a wave of tingling pleasure that flowed across her skin. She wondered, for just a moment, what it might be like to taste his lips on hers. “I’m May,” she heard herself say. “I’ve been part of the Guild since—” The shields slammed down in her mind. “Wow, nice trick. You’re good.”
“May and Lillian have been with us for a small while,” Serene said. “You need not concern yourself with them.”
“I concern myself as I choose. And yes, I am.” He turned his gaze away from May, who shuddered at the sudden absence.
His eyes locked onto Lillian. She blushed scarlet. “Okay, you’ve made your point,” Serene said.
“Have I?” he said, tone mild. “What point do you believe I am making? No, never mind, I don’t care. I’m more concerned about what ill wind has tossed you up upon my shore.”
“I’m certain you must’ve heard the news, even in a magical backwater like this,” Serene said. “The Adversary, open war…”
“Ah, yes, now that you mention it, I do think I heard some rumblings,” Sam said. “Rather nasty affair, from the sound of it. But what I cannot quite grasp is how that relates in any way to me. Where’s the proud Serene, the Serene so confident in her ability to manage her own affairs?”
“Believe me, if I felt I had any other choice, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Oh, I have no doubt. It must’ve been terrible, swallowing your pride. Though I am pleased you brought along such lovely company. Iris, it’s been far too long. Your work on waveguide-thaumaturgy over digital packet-switched networks is remarkable.”
“Your who what?” Lillian said.
“Casting spells over the Internet,” Iris said. “I’m still not certain it’s possible.”
After almost three years of effort, I finally had my last dental appointment yesterday. In honor of the journey, my dentist wore bunny ears during that last session.
It started with a failed crown. That in itself shouldn’t have turned into a three-year nightmare, but gather ’round, Gentle Readers, for a harrowing tale to send chills down the spines of the most manly of men.
The crown was old; I got it in 1998 or 1999. Apparently these things don’t last forever (who knew?); they’re usually rated for fifteen years and this one lasted 25, so yay for that, I guess?
Anyway, I took the broken crown to my dentist, who looked at it, peered into my mouth, probed around a bit, said “hmm” a lot, then said something you never want to hear from a healthcare professional:
“We don’t deal with this kind of situation here. You’ll need to go somewhere else.”
Now, we’re talking about what ought to be, in the scheme of things, a rather simple and straightforward procedure (ha ha ha as if, just you wait), not the sort of medical condition where a doctor gets to name a new disease, so I found this…peculiar. But, referral in hand, I made an appointment with a new dentist.
They too looked at the broken crown, poked around for a bit, said “hmm” a lot, took a whole bunch of X-rays, said “hmm” some more, took a different kind of X-ray, said “hmm,” and then my dentist called another dentist over, who looked at all the X-rays, said “hmm,” then said “I’m going to call someone else to have a look at this.”
That is when I knew, Gentle Reader, that Something Was Up.
The new guy showed up, looked at the X-rays, said “hmm” several times, and then said “okay, so, Mr. Veaux, you see…”
The problem was not the crown that failed, but the one next to it. I’d had a root canal in…goodness. Um, 1996, maybe? Somewhere thereabouts.
In this world, there are people who take pride in their work, people for whom it’s not just the money but the satisfaction of a job well done. The guy who did that root canal…wasn’t that sort of person.
The X-ray showed a small void, a gap between the crown on that tooth and the tooth itself.
It also showed a large piece of a broken tool lodged inside the tooth.
And it showed that the dentist had, and as I type these words I did not know this was possible, missed one of the tooth roots completely, which had, of course, become infected.
They had a meeting, in which they discussed whether they wanted to re-do the root canal by taking off the existing crown, drilling through the existing crown, or (and yes, this actually came up as a possibility) drilling through the bottom of my jaw into the tooth, which is apparently a procedure that, God help them, some people actually undergo.
Then my mom was diagnosed with cancer, so both my sister and I started flying back and forth between home and Florida to help my dad care for her.Which pretty much scuttled most of my ability to plan multiple dental visits.
My mom died after a thirteen-month battle, the last few months of which were just awful beyond belief.
When I returned once more unto the breach of this dental misadventure, I had The Talk™ with my dentist, and with the dentist called in to re-do the root canal. The Talk™ looks like this:
Just so you know, I am highly resistant to local anesthetics. It’s a genetic trait, I inherited it from my mom. It is much harder than you think to get me numb, and it takes a long time, and it wears off quickly. So, be warned.
I always tell them. They never listen at first. “Oh, don’t worry, I can get you numb,” each new dentist says, “it won’t be a problem.”
Narrator: “It was a problem.”
The guy they called in to handle the root canal took nearly an hour, and seven ampules of lidocaine(!!), before he declared himself ready.
He went in through the existing crown, which was something of an ordeal involving several fascinating smells, including one I could almost swear smelled like smoke, and rather a lot more “hmm” and “that’s interesting” and “I wonder if…” than I am, generally speaking, entirely comfortable with from someone who is placing medical instruments in any part of my body.
Apparently, from what I gather, the tooth had an extra root, which I didn’t even know was a thing that could happen, and that explains why the previous guy back in the 90s missed it but doesn’t explain why he left a broken bit of tool inside the root canal (they didn’t give me a copy of the X-ray, more’s the pity, because it’s freaky and I’d love to horrify you, Gentle Reader, with it).
After rather a lot of work, he pronounced himself satisfied, and I was back on track, only this time with replacing two crowns rather than one.
I be-bopped off to Springfield to spend time with my Talespinner, then returned to tilt once more at the windmill, when my dentist took a whole new set of X-rays on account of, you know, I’d been away for thirteen months helping care for my mom, and decided that a third crown, also from the mid 90s or somewhere thereabout, was separating from the tooth and thus was well past its use-by date.
I will spare you the details of the last seven months, even though Fate did not spare me, because unlike Fate I have a conscience. Suffice to say that seven months, a detached temporary crown, and three thousand dollar in out-of-pocket expenses later, I have been given a clean bill of health, and my dentist sent me off from yesterday’s appointment with a celebratory pair of ears of his own.
Which I, and the entire rest of the office, found charming.
Now the days spread before me, my calendar has no dental appointments on it, and I breathe in and say to myself, “is this what normal feels like?”
Some while ago, I answered a question over on Quora about whether or not it’s okay to pirate a video game if you can’t afford it. I write for a living, which of course means I take intellectual property seriously. Also, I write for a living, which means I don’t have very much money.
So, as you might imagine, I answered no, it’s not okay to steal other people’s work, even if you can’t afford to buy it, and as an example I used Starfield, the massive single-player role-playing game from Bethesda.
I like Bethesda games. I have, as of the time of writing this, sunk over 1,990 hours into Skyrim and 1,570 hours into Fallout 4. I’ve itched to play Starfield since I first heard of it, but at seventy bucks for the “normal” game and a hundred bucks for the “premium” version, I was like nah.
So, Quora being what it is, one of the kind folks over there bought me a copy, and another friend on Quora gave me a machine that could play it.
Which was amazing.
I now have about 225 hours in Starfield, and it’s so, so close to being a good game, but it just…isn’t.
All the ingredients are there for a truly amazing game except one: the game designers forgot to make it fun.
It’s an innovative game. It’s a pretty game, in places (and in places it’s howlingly bad). It has a bunch of cool, well-thought-out design ideas. It’s just not fun.
So, let’s do a deep dive into why Starfield misfired so badly. Caution: Long essay is long.
Part 0: WTF is Starfield?
It’s Skyrim in space. Seriously, it’s Skyrim in space.
If you know and love Skyrim, you’ll largely know what to expect. You, a blue-collar miner in the ass end of the explored universe, come across a Cosmic Mystery™ that catapults you on an adventure. Along the way, you’ll team up with companions who will guide you (and maybe marry you), you’ll engage in countless battles, and you’ll develop strange powers never before seen, only instead of gaining powers from long-forgotten ancient temples you explore with the aid of your trusty bow and an overpowered Sneak skill, you’ll gain powers from long-forgotten ancient temples you explore with the aid of your trusty laser gun and an overpowered Sneak skill.
You’ll also gather resources to build outposts on widely-scattered planets, rather than gathering resources to build settlements in widely-scattered parts of Boston.
Honestly, this sounded like pure pixelated crack cocaine to me. (Did I mention I’ve over a thousand hours in both Skyrim and Fallout 4?) Take a mashup of Skyrim and Fallout and put them in SPAAAACE!!!!!™? Sign me the hell up! What’s that you say? I can design and build my own spaceships too? You already had me! Let’s do it!
And yet…and yet…
Somehow, it manages not to be nearly as interesting as Skyrim or Fallout. It’s huge—a hundred worlds with endless procedurally generated terrain to explore—but it feels tiny. The main city in Starfield, New Atlantis, is the largest city Bethesda has ever created, but it feels stifling.
So what went wrong?
Part 1: The Bits that Work
Before I do a deep dive into the parts that went off the rails, I want to acknowledge that there’s a lot to like.
The spaceship crafting is amazing.
This is my ship, Anopheles.
This is a ship I have in one way or another been working on for forty years. Back in my high school days, I played in a Traveller pen and paper role-playing game (remember that? The game where you could die during character generation?) with my best friend down the street and the rest of my friends circle. We flew around in Anopheles, named for the mosquito that carries malaria—a tiny, heavily-armed five-person ship, fast and light, with no armor but a hell of a punch.
Later, after university, I ran a hard-SF GURPS Space game for about five or six years, in which the players explored the Rich Cluster, a small globular star cluster with about a dozen habitable worlds all quite close to each other, in which the players flew around getting involved in weird political messes in Anopheles—you got it, a tiny, heavily-armed five-person ship named after the mosquito that carries malaria.
My Starfield ship was again a tiny, heavily-armed craft with a long spine projecting from the front that carries a bunch of particle beam weapons that chew through much larger, more heavily-armed spacecraft.
I had endless fun designing this ship, building it, upgrading it, improving it.
A fair bit of Starfield involves space combat, and the Starfield ship to ship combat system is complicated, with many different classes of weapons (lasers, missiles, railguns, particle beams) that you assign to different mouse buttons. Some weapons are good against shields, some against the enemy hull. You can fire at the enemy in general or target different systems (engines, FTL drive, shields, weapons). You need to use different weapons at different times—projectiles, for example, are effective against a ship’s hull but ineffective against shields, so you use lasers against the shields until they’re down, then switch to—
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, I’m kidding.
I mean, that’s how it’s supposed to work, and during combat you’re supposed to think about how you allocate power between different weapons sysstems and engines and shields and such, but as soon as you figure out that particle beam weapons work against shields and ships, you just stop faffing about with all that, put the biggest reactor you can on your ship, load it down with particle beam weapons, and tear through ships four times your size like they’re tissue paper.
The companions are really well done.
At the start of the game, you end up joining a group called Constellation, intent on uncovering the mysteries of the universe. Many of the companions you can choose from are Constellation members, but they’re all different.
The companion characters’ personalities are nuanced, subtle, and complex. The first companion you travel with is so well done that I ended up not starting an in-game romantic relationship with her because she reminded me in subtle ways of the judgmental bossiness of a real-life ex enough to give me the shivers.
Instead, I ended up marrying Andreja, the introverted, possibly-on-the-spectrum badass with the secret past.
Andreja is BAE. And if you marry her, the wedding gift she gives you is amazing. Not, like, in a game mechanics way, but symbolically.
Fallout allows you to romance multiple characters who are all, apparently, totally on board with you having more than one lover. Not so in Starfield, where monogamy is apparently Very Much A Thing and romancing one character means no more nookie from others unless you divorce first. Limitless technological advancement, suburban 20th century American values.
Some of the quests are amazing.
As with Fallout 4, the companion you choose to travel with can give you quests. The quest you get from Sarah starts out seeming pretty predictable, and about halfway through I was rolling my eyes, certain I knew how it would end…but the game surprised me. It’s really well done and handled with exquisite care.
The quest Entangled has you flipping back and forth between two different timelines after an accident in a research facility. It’s nothing like any quest I’ve played in a computer RPG before, it never stops being cool, and overall it’s an absolute blast.
The same corridor in the two different timelines in Entangled
There’s a whole series of quests centered on rising through the ranks of corporate spy/fixer at a megacorporation called Ryujin Industries that I can only imagine was as much marvelous fun to write as it was to play (tip: bump up your Stealth skill before you do it!).
Ryujin’s corporate HQ
The Music
I mean, it’s Inon Zur. Of course it’s good.
I personally like the Fallout 4 soundtrack better—there’s more variety, and the music is less ambient (the main theme and Of Green and Grey still give me chills), but seriously, that man could write music based on his shopping list and it would be amazing. The only video game music that has ever stuck with me like the soundtrack from Fallout 4 are the songs Nightsong and Outlaw Harbor C, both from World of Warcraft.
The “New Game+” system is…um.
I’m honestly not sure whether to put the NG+ system in the Bits That Work section or the Bits That Don’t. So let’s do this:
Part 1.5: New Game+
Starfield has this thing that happens, that Bethesda called “New Game+”, that lets you start a new game without starting a new game.
Okay, so (minor spoilers for the main story):
The game starts out with you, a lowly miner in a miserable backwater, carving out a mysterious possibly-alien artifact from the rock. The moment you touch it, you have a Cosmic Experience with lights and music and trippy visuals, and so you’re tasked to take the strange artifact to Constellation and that kicks off the main adventure.
As you collect more of these ancient maybe-alien artifacts, you find temples that grant you strange powers, and eventually you learn that the artifacts can be assembled into this nexus that lets you skip between alternate universes.
If you choose to leave the universe you’re in for a different universe, it’s like starting a new game: you start out at Constellation with no money, no possessions save for a really freaky-ass Starborn spaceship (because you’re Starborn now, a member of a rarified handful of people with the ability to cross between parallel universes), except that you keep your character level and all your skills and abilities.
Hence, New Game+. You’re starting a new game, only with on old character you’ve already developed.
The good: You can explore all the various ways to end different quests or all the various factions you can side with without actually starting a new game from scratch. Don’t like the way things turned out? Wish you hadn’t sided with that faction? Leave this universe behind for a new one, where nobody knows you and you haven’t done any quests, and start again! It’s a really cool idea.
The bad: Implementation sucks.
I was sad to leave behind Anopheles but eager to see what I could do with this really freaky alien Starborn ship that I got.
Answer: Nothing.
Nothing. You can’t upgrade it. You can’t swap out any parts of it, or customize it, or modify it. You can’t sell it. You can’t do anything with it except customize the furniture inside, and the layout is so weird there’s really not much you can do even with that. One of the coolest parts of the game, and it just doesn’t apply when you flip between universes.
So you’ll probably want to capture, buy, or hijack a ship in every new universe, just so you can, you know, play with the shipbuilding parts of the game.
The cities are all laid out exactly the same way in the alternate universes; every major non-procedurally-generated location is precisely the same. Yet for reasons I cannot comprehend, they act like brand new locations—you can’t fast travel to them without visiting them on foot first, even though they’re all the same.
You shift between universes with nothing. Not even your spacesuit or clothes. You’re given a new spacesuit to go with your new spaceship, but no clothes, no money, no weapons, no tools, nothing. I think it would be far more interesting if you shifted with your clothes, some money, and perhaps a limited amount of equipment—like fifty kilograms or twenty kilograms or whatever. Enough to take some things that you really like, but with a small enough limit you have to make choices.
In the game, the Starborn are all pretty universally assholes, and after you’ve played NG+ you can see why. When you can just blamf to a new universe to escape the consequences of everything you’ve done, the stakes suddenly get very, very low. It would be cool if consequences somehow followed you. In every universe, you keep getting harassed and attacked for no readily apparent reason by other Starborn who seem to think you’re “unworthy,” but there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Maybe if different factions of Starborn reacted differently to choices you made in the universes you left behind? Dunno, just spitballing.
Part 2: Why The Game Misfires
At this point, Bethesda has such a reputation for launching games in a buggy, half-finished state and fixing everything after it goes out the door that complaining feels like piling on.
But still:
It’s buggy it’s buggy it’s buggy oh my God it’s buggy
When I first got the game, it was unplayable. My game system is AMD Athlon/Radeon based, and for a while it would swear the graphic card drivers were outdated on launch every time, even though they most assuredly weren’t.
It would also crash about 25% of the time on loading screens between locations, until I learned to turn contact shadows off in the game settings, which mostly fixed it.
Later patches of the game gradually improved the stability, to the point where I now play for hours without a crash, but it took a while to get there.
While the game doesn’t crash constantly any more, the procedural generation still needs help. It has a weird habit of putting rocks and random boxes and other elements not touching the ground.
This kind of stuff happens very frequently. There are parts of the game where rocks are supposed to be floating in midair, because there’s an “antigravity element” in the game. This isn’t one of them.
Like most Bethesda games, there’s a crafting system. You can modify your weapons and spacesuits, craft pharmaceuticals, and make other items at various types of workbenches.
And the whole system is buggy AF. A workbench will often say that you can’t use it because someone else is using it even when there’s no human being within a light year of you. (Sleeping on a bed sometimes fixes it.)
Or it will say that a workbench is “obstructed” and can’t be used when it’s not. (Shooting the workbench with a gun sometimes fixes it—yes, I’m serious.)
Or you’ll go through the animation to use it and then just…stop, and you won’t be able to craft anything. (Again, shooting the workbench with a gun sometimes fixes it, no idea why.)
The lockpicking minigame
Fuck me, it’s annoying. I actively look for reasons not to pick locks.
Every Bethesda game has a lockpicking minigame. You stick something, whether that’s a lockpick or a bobby pin, into a lock and turn. There’s a “sweet spot” where if you position the lockpick right it opens, otherwise it sticks, and there’s a chance it might break the lockpick. Simple, self-evident the first time you do it, easy…and dull.
So Bethesda said “why not make the lockpick thing an actual game?”
Great idea. Terrible execution.
It’s tedious, it’s complex, there’s almost no on-boarding so you have no idea what you’re doing, and every time you try to pick a lock and give up in frustration you lose a lockpick…and in this game they’re scarce.
It’s not at all obvious how the lockpicking system works, especially when it gets complex with higher-difficulty locks—I’ve read a half dozen tutorials and I’m still often confused (as are other players, judging from the number of tutorials and the comments on them). I predict that it won’t be long until someone makes a mod to skip the lockpicking minigame. When they do, I’m installing it, assuming I ever decide to start playing again.
The outpost system
Jesus Christ on a three-legged tap-dancing camel, the system of establishing colonies on distant worlds is deeply broken—a confusing, poorly thought-out mess that’s the exact opposite of fun.
Fallout 4 introduced a settlement system, where you, the player, can build and secure little towns that attract settlers, build houses, plant crops, set up defenses, create supply lines between settlements, even set up artillary you can use to call down strikes for a certain distance around the settlements.
Starfield takes that system and makes it crappier in every single way.
The ensuckification of the settlement system knows no bounds. It’s complex, obtuse, requires investment of way too many skill points, and the player is thrown into it with no tutorial and no clear guidance whatsoever.
The idea is simple: Different planets have different resources, like iron and titanium and fluorine and whatever. You can land on just about any planet, plonk down a settlement, then place buildings, resource extractors, resource storage, walls, defenses, and so forth. Resource extractors will automatically mine resources, then transfer them to storage bays so you can come collect them later.
Each storage unit can only hold so many resources, though, and it gets tedious to come back and keep picking them up. If only you could make them available wherever you wanted!
Wait, you can!
Maybe. I mean, I think you can? I’m not really sure. I spent hours trying to figure it out and I still have no clue how it works.
You can set up in-system and interstellar shipping lanes between your outposts. Or rather you sorta can, there are ways to do it, but apparently they rely on loading your outpost with Helium-3 or something? That’s what all the online tutorials say, but I was never able to load Helium-3 into any of the transport ships; there’s a place where you supposedly do it, but whenever I clicked on it and hit the Interact key, nothing happened.
I was finally able to set up an outpost on a planet with Helium-3 and connect a Helium-3 extractor to the cargo ship pad instead of to a storage tank and I think that worked. I saw cargo ships come and go, but I have no idea if they actually moved any resources around.
There are dozens of tutorials on Starfield outposts and I read every one and still have no idea how to make it work. Apparently you can move certain resources in certain directions but you can’t link all your outposts to each other like you can link all your settlements together in Fallout 4. They have to be linked in a line, maybe? I don’t know.
While I was fumbling around with it, I somehow got an achievement:
2.6% of all players managed to link five outposts together. That tells me this part of the game is just as confusing to 97.4% of players as it was to me. I had a quest to link an outpost to a city, but I was never able to complete it successfully. Fukifino.
There’s absolutely no in-game explanation for how this works. None. Zero. Zip. I say without exaggeration or hyperbole that if a saboteur had somehow gained employment with Bethesda for the purpose of screwing up their next-gen AAA game, he could not have done a better job of cacking things up than what the game designers did with outposts in Starfield. It’s that bad.
“Poor on-boarding” and “completely opaque game mechanisms” are pretty much the hallmark of Starfield, which I gather from spending a lot of time Googling how to do things in the game put off a lot of players, like a whole lot.
Lord of the Rings is a movie about walking. Starfield is a game about running.
Hope you like big open spaces, because Starfield is the Game of Big. Open. Spaces.
When you play Skyrim or Fallout 4, they feel…dense. You get the sense that you’re actually in a place. Like, a physical place, with roads and shops and pathways through the landscape.
This:
is a pretty typical view from Fallout 4. (Yes, I play on an iMac, what of it?) You have a sense of place. This feels like a real environment. All those buildings? You can go to them, explore them, wander around in them. Every object in Boston was placed by a person.
Starfield gives you 100 planets to explore, but they’re all pretty much the same.
This is a procedurally generated map of a section of a planet in Starfield. It’s a big expanse of nothing with pre-formed buildings plonked down at random locations.
There’s about a dozen or so types of buildings that can be placed: an abandoned cryo lab, an abandoned weapons factory, an abandoned research tower, and so on.
Thing is, every single one of these buildings is identical. The abandoned cryo lab you find on one planet is exactly the same as the abandoned cryo lab you find on a different planet, down to the map, the location of chests, where the enemies are, the location of dead bodies, everything. If you’ve been in one abandoned cryo lab you have, quite literally, been in all of them.
And they’re scattered at random with no rhyme or reason, separated by kilometers and kilometers of empty space, no roads, no nothing. Just “okay, I think I’ll bould a research tower here.” “Yeah, I’m going to put a weapons factory two kilometers away.” “Cool. Is yours abandoned?” “Well, except for space pirates, yeah. Yours?” “Space pirates, yeah.”
You never get the sense you’re actually exploring a space. Even the main cities are just plopped down surrounded by identical buildings placed at random around them. At no time in my 200+ hours did I ever once feel “wow, cool, I am really in a different place!”
Here’s a procedurally generated planet. There’s a randomly placed building in front of me, identical to every other building of its type. 798 meters away is another randomly placed building. If I want to go from here to there, I…
…run almost a kilometer.
No, I can’t get in my ship and fly a kilometer. I have to run. Yeah, it takes as long as you think. You spend a lot of time in this game running across empty terrain from one building you’ve seen a hundred times already to a different building you’ve seen a hundred times already.
In other games, every location is different. You descend into a Dwemer ruin or a grand burial chamber inhabited by undead in Skyrim and they’re all different from each other. Here, you go to Abandoned Cryo Lab #117, pixel for pixel identical to all the other 116 Abandoned Cryo Labs you’ve been in, and filled with the same enemies in the same location…
…and oh, how you will come to hate the Abandoned Cryo Lab. It’s hands down the worst designed dungeon I’ve ever seen in any RPG. (This seems a popular opinion, by the way. One guy online talked about how he simply memorized a path through the Abandoned Cryo Lab and just speedruns through it whenever he finds one.)
The Sooper Sekrit Powers™ Minigame
In Skyrim, your character can unlock “shouts,” kind of like magic spells written in the language of the dragons. Every so often you’ll find a ruin with a “Word Wall” in it. The Word Wall has writing on it in the dragon language, and when you get close, a swirling light surrounds you and you learn a new spell.
Something almost identical happens in Starfield. Every now and then, you find an ancient temple. The ancient temple has a stargate ring-thing in it. You fly through it and you learn a new power, like the ability to alter gravity to fling enemies around, or make a duplicate of yourself in combat.
Pretty cool. Not new or groundbreaking, but pretty cool…
…except that from a gameplay perspective they fucked it up.
When you go into a temple, a Stargate SG1-style ring appears and gravity stops and you fly around. And then you get frustrated because you fly through the ring and nothing happens so you fly through the ring and nothing happens so you get bored and leave.
Then you go online, and you discover that there’s a lot of lens flare around a glowing ball hanging in space and you have to fly through that before you fly through the ring. Nothing in the game tells you that. Nothing. I have no idea how the first player figured it out.
But wait, that’s not really true. See, if you fly through the lens flare then fly through the gate, nothing happens. You have to fly through the lens flare five times (or sometimes four or sometimes twenty, I think it’s on a timer but I’m not sure) and then fly through the gate.
Seriously.
You have to do this over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, every single time you find a ruined temple. Fly through the lens flare five times and then fly through the stargate and then kill me now please this is so fucking tedious it makes the lockpicking minigame feel like a luxury all-expenses-paid Hawaiian vacation please come back lockpicking minigame all is forgiven JFC.
I don’t know what game designer thought this would be fun, but that person needs therapy stat.
Oh, and then a dude comes out and says you’re not worthy so you shoot him.
The crafting system is completely broken
Fans of Skyrim and Fallout will by now not be surprised to know that Starfield lets you improve weapons and armor and spacesuits and such, just like you can in those other games, but once again they’ve bolloxed it up.
This one is a twofer. You get two, two, two game-mechanical misfires for the price of one!
When you go up a level, you get points you can put into various skills. These skills make you a better shot or let you use boost packs (which are really rather fun) or get more power from your ship reactor or repair ship damage in battle faster or whatever, and just like in previous games, if you want to be able to make the best weapon or armor mods you need to spend points in the skills that give you better access to those mods.
Unlike in Skyrim or Fallout, that’s not enough.
After you’ve spent those skill points, you still can’t do the thing until you also go to a research station and research how to do them. Spending skill points only unlocks the ability to do the research. Doing the research then gives you the ability to modify your gun or whatever.
You have to do this multiple times for each part of your weapon or armor you want to modify…
…and it costs a tremendous amount of resources to do that research.
Which you then have to do over and over again as you gain more levels and spend more points.
It makes modifying your gear incredibly expensive and time-consuming, for what is usually fairly modest gain.
But wait, it gets shittier!
You can find resources on planets you explore, like iron or titanium or whatever. And then you spend resources on research so you can spend more research on making new gunsights or making your spacesuit bullet resistant.
But…
…there is a limit to how much stuff you can carry. There is a limit to how much stuff your spaceship can carry. And holy fucknuggets are the resources heavy.
One of the very first mods released for Starfield, before even the ability to create mods in a sanctioned way had been introduced, was a mod that made resources weigh less because after you’ve spent six or seven trips going to and from your spaceship carrying hundreds of kilograms of resources, you get a bit sick of it. (Oh yeah, that’s a thing: a lot of storage chests in this game have weight limits. Man that gets frustrating fast. Resource management in this game suuuuuuucks. People complained about the same problem in Fallout 76 so the game devs were like “hold my beer.”)
Again, it almost feels like they were intentionally trying to take the fun out of the game.
Reeeeesources!!!
While we’re on the subject…
Fuck me, Bethesda, do you understand what a “spacesuit” does?
Okay, so. You’re running (and running and running and running and running) along a barren empty expanse of nothing, just like you’ve been doing for the past ten minutes, and you find a crack in the ground with argon gas coming out of it.
Never mind how inane that is, suspension of disbelief, yadda yadda yadda, roll with it.
Now, you’re in a spacesuit. I want to emphasize this. You’re in a spacesuit.
Argon is a resource, so you walk over to the crack and collect some argon. Cool!
Only now an alarm goes off and you start taking damage because caution danger poison gas poison gas get away.
Let me reiterate this one more time:
You.
Are.
In.
A.
Spacesuit.
You are in a spacesuit. On a barren and uninhabitable, maybe airless, moon. You’re wearing a spacesuit. A spacesuit is the thing you are in.
And somehow you’re being poisoned.
By this argon.
Which is an inert, noble, non-toxic gas.
While you are in, and I cannot emphasize this enough, a spacesuit. Like, the thing you wear in space.
I don’t even know how to even.
Consensus says: Not a sticky game
I genuinely don’t see myself playing this game for a thousand hours.
I’d planned to play the game long enough to get every achievement you can get, but I gave up with one achievement still to go: reach Level 100. I’m currently level 70something…76, maybe? And I just cannot see myself slogging through what it will take to get to level 100. Ugh.
When you get an achievement, for hitting certain milestones or completing certain quests, you’re also told how many other players have earned that achievement. And judged by that metric, things look…dire.
More than half of players quit before they reach level 25—a level which is, just for the record, not that hard to reach. A bit more than a third have completed thirty missions that you can pick up in any bar or pub.
Less than a quarter finish Entangled, what I think is the coolest quest in the game and one of the best I’ve played in any role-playing game…ouch.
Fifteen percent mod a lot of weapons, in a game where modding weapons is a core mechanic…unfff that’s gotta hurt. These numbers speak to me of a game that just plain cannot capture people’s attention the way Fallout and Skyrim do.
Amazon just released a TV show based on Fallout, which is really quite good. I…don’t see that happening with Starfield. There’s just not a lot of “there” there. The procedural generation stuff…I get it, I get what they were trying to do, really, I get it, but oh my God. There are too few types of buildings and they are all…the…same.
And way too much of this game just feels like a chore. Running back and forth and back and forth with armloads of resources, repeating the same minigames over and over again, and the incomprehensibly baroque outpost system that I still haven’t figured out despite being in that rarified 2.6% of players who get the outpost achievement…how did this not get caught early in the development cycle? This is not a newbie company. This is a company that has an absolute talent for producing fun, immersive, addictive games…why is this game so goddamn dreary?
There’s a new addon to the game due in the next month or two, and I’ve been waiting for it with bated…hahaha no, I literally haven’t thought about it since it came across my Steam feed.
Will I get it? If it’s $7.99, sure. If it’s $19.99, no. If it’s $30, as a quick Google search suggests is likely, not just no but hell no. I got the game as a gift and I just cannot see myself spending money to play it any more.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go roll a new character in Fallout 4.
