Replanted

Does anyone remember Demon Seed? It was a 70's novel, and then a movie, about an artificial intelligence that decides it wants to be human, and that being human means reproducing. I remember staying up late one night when I was in high school to watch the movie on television, and when I was in college I managed to come across a copy of the novel and read it. Like most such things, the novel and the movie are fairly different from one another, and, as usual, the novel was better.

I was thinking about the story recently, because in the novel version, Susan, the primary victim in this techno-horror, basically has a bunch of agents that do things for her, so that she doesn't have to interact with other people, or even leave her home, really. And this is what allows Proteus to trap her in her own home without anyone being any the wiser.

While the old-school version of the story would set off enough trigger warnings to deafen someone, it's a story that is due for an update. While Dean Koontz is 80 years old, he's still writing, and I recall hearing that he'd updated the story in the late 1990s (a version that dials things back, in accordance with changing sensibilities). But there are other writers who could take a stab at updating things to the 2026 state of the art. Between generative automation agents and driverless vehicles, all it needs is some home automation that's not terribly more sophisticated than what we have now. Throw in a couple of Boston Robotics or Tesla Optimus-style humanoid robots and you're golden. Of course, the story would like need to be toned down again, and Susan would have to be a somewhat more active character, but I could see this being the kind of novel that would do well, because many people enjoy being scared, and a novel about an evil machine intelligence would align with many people's views on the topic.

Of course, I could also see this doing well on streaming, given that horror movies tend to do well. And people realizing that the bones of this story date back to the early 70s would likely blow a few minds. But maybe Hollywood is already working on a new treatment of this. They're pretty good at sniffing out ideas that will resonate with the public. And if not, someone should get on that. I smell a blockbuster.

Repetition

 

Just to make sure you understand.

Because anything worth doing is worth doing to excess, apparently.

Destined

Because it's the "in" thing, video game studio Bungie (the creators of the Halo franchise, and, more recently Destiny and the rebooted Marathon) has laid off a significant number of staff. According to a statement published online, part of the reason for the reorganization of the company was that "Destiny 2 fell short of expectations these past several years."

I played Destiny and Destiny 2 for quite a long time, even if I wasn't all that great at it. They were fun games, at least for a time. One day, after not having played Destiny 2 for some time, I loaded it up again, and within 30 minutes was having a grand old time, running, jumping around the map and shooting aliens in the face. After a couple of hours, when I logged off, I asked myself, "Why did I stop playing this game?"

The next day there was an update, and a new environment opened up. Being the sort of gamer who loves to explore the environments (especially when they are as well-crafted as Destiny's were), I jumped in, and found myself in a mission to fight my way through some sort of spaceship or orbital station... I don't remember which. It was fine, until my character encountered the final boss. And died. I tried again. And died. Over, and over, and over again, I adjusted my tactics, tinkered with my character's loadout, and tried again. Only to be killed by a powerful, and bullet-spongy final boss. Which reminded me of why I'd stopped playing Destiny 2.

Destiny 2 was a very particular type of game, and one aimed at a very particular type of first-person shooter player. It likely goes without saying that I was not that type of player. And so I eventually found myself pushed out of the game, because I didn't have the inclination, or the time, to mold myself into the sort of player that the game was geared towards, and Bungie wasn't ready and or able to make the game more accommodating of other types of players.

According to the "Bartle taxonomy of player types," first laid out 30 years ago by Richard Bartle, I'm an Explorer. I'm the sort of player who love to have their character wander around in new environments and just check them out. Finding a secret or hidden pathway to something I've never seen before is the highlight of a session for me.

And Destiny 2 wasn't built for that sort of thing. It had a number of really interesting places to explore, but many of them were gated behind difficult fight sequences, or were parts of raids and weren't really designed to just roam around and examine in detail. And so I drifted away.

With new companies, the question they have to be able to answer is: Why should people stop playing their current favorite games to play yours? For established companies like Bungie, the question becomes: Why should people continue to play your game, rather than explore what else is out there?" And I think that they didn't take that question as seriously as perhaps they might. And the business is starting to wither as a result.

One Week Left

A week from today will be the 4th of July, and 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It's supposed to be a big deal.

But it will, of course, be just another day in the grand scheme of things, and even in the life of the nation. Especially given that so many people have fundamental disagreements of what, if anything, there is to celebrate.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that "A House divided against itself cannot stand," but the United States has always been divided, often in multiple ways, and it's still here. The Trump Administration may not be doing much to bring the nation together (unsurprising, given how few people seem to genuinely want such an outcome), but even they are unlikely to bring the whole enterprise down around everyone's heads.

And so life will go on. As it has for all of the years before. Because change is expensive, and very few people feel flush enough to pay what it asks. And so they don't volunteer. And when change has to happen, the costs are passed along until they find someone with no choice but to cough up. And because the perception of scarcity is perhaps the biggest threat to self-governance, the American version of representative and participatory government seems to be at risk, even as it's grown to encompass a vast number of people that, in 1776, were not considered to have the requisite powers of reason to be allowed to have a say in things.

The trade-offs that would need to be made to improve things are straightforward, but also easier said than done, because someone's going to have to be the first person to extend a hand, even though there's a very real chance that it will be cut off, because one should never give a villain an even break. And sometimes, this comes across as a society that dearly loves to have villains.

As I've grown older, I've come to the conclusion that there's no such thing as deserves. The world is as it is, and there is no way in which it ought to be different. If one wants it to change, then one's task is to effectuate that change, either on one's own, or with a group of the like-minded. But, of course, there's more to it than that, because someone will have to pay the price for those changes, and if that feels more like a sacrifice (or theft) than an investment, there will be resistance. And to the degree that such resistance is taken to be the proof of one's correctness, it's cultivated. And so there will be grievance and resentment on what should be a nationwide celebration.

Because the United States of America is made up of people, just like everywhere else is. Perhaps there needs to be a greater recognition of that. That would also be something to celebrate.

Three by Three

Pew Research has published their most recent data on the political typology of the United States, which divides the nation into nine broad ideological categories, namely:

• No Apologies Right
• Faith First Conservatives
• Unconventional Right
• Pragmatic and Polite Right
• Tuned-Out Middle
• Order and Opportunity Left
• Left-Out Left
• Loyal Liberals
• Leftward Progressives

I find it somewhat convenient that there are four right-leaning types, four left-leaning and one rather disengaged one in the center, but I suppose that it makes things more accessible to people that way, given the degree to which many Americans understand politics to only have the single Right-Left dimension.

But, and perhaps this is simply more proof that I'm a nerd, the first thing that came to mind was a Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart, which also has nine types, defined in a grid having Good-Neutral-Evil on one axis and Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic on the other. Dropping Pew's "Tuned-Out Middle" into the "True Neutral" center box of D&D alignments is simple enough, but it become fairly complicated from there... Which type would map to Neutral Evil? Or Chaotic Good?

One could make a political quiz out of that itself... Give people the descriptions of the nine different Types, have them place them on an alignment chart and then see what their choices say about them, and their Type. Given that there are nine Types and nine alignments, I suspect that most people would seek to create a 1:1 correlation, but there's no reason why two or more Types couldn't share a single alignment. For people like me, who don't really believe that real world people ever genuinely qualify as Evil, they'd have to.

But I'm in the minority, I think. I'd be willing to bet that many Left-leaning Americans would have little difficulty filling the three Evil boxes on the alignment chart with the Right-leaning types from the Pew survey and vice-versa. And that there's useful (if perhaps depressing) information in that. Because part of the nature of high levels of partisanship, especially negative affective partisanship, is the view that people on the other side of things are the enemy. And part of the rationale that drives in-group versus out-group animosity is often the idea that the out-group is willfully, deliberately, perverse.

If, for example, a person who identifies with the Faith First Conservatives places themselves as Lawful Good, and slots the Left-Out Left into Chaotic Evil, that tells one a lot about how they view both groups. Them placing the Pragmatic and Polite Right into the Chaotic Evil box says something different, but just as enlightening, especially in a political environment where "having the right enemies" can be an important marker of group identity.