Diablo 3, gnostic overtones, and the plot threads

If you are not expecting  massive spoilers for Diablo 3 in this post, I should inform you they will be present.

I’m giving you time in the form of these two sentences to get away now, and if you click through, it’s on your head if you find spoilers for the game because they absolutely will be there and I have warned you in advance.

A scene involving a monster and a fire

The house of his grandmother and grandfather, the old red stained wood which had been the first place he’d seen an insect eaten by a spider – the first place he’d torn his flesh open with clumsiness and gasped in horror at the sight of his own blood fleeing from him – the place where his father had shown him how to climb a tree, or use a slingshot, the house that they’d spent summer after summer in for years after both those grandparents had died, the house that held the books and papers and boxes of old photos store up in the attic, with walls built in the 1700’s by ancestors who would fight in wars for England up in Acadia, then in a war to be free of England – that house exploded with him still in it.

He was hurled into the air by the blast. It was as if a club made of wind and sound had battered him away, reeling, up into the air. He actually crashed through the wood of the walls before the blast itself did, and then hung in an arc, his clothing on fire, before crashing to the embrace of the soil in a tumbling mass throwing up clouds.

A second passed. Several followed it, as seconds usually do. Aside from the flaming wreckage of the farmhouse there was nothing moving.

Apologies if you expect more political discussion

I don’t do it very often. I’m going to try and go back to working on fiction here. If you need to know my beliefs, they are simple. All human beings regardless of race, gender, sexuality or some other distinction I may be forgetting or omitting deserve the same basic rights and freedoms. Being born in the United States, the US Constitution has greatly affected what I believe those rights should be. I believe we should all get sufficient health care, that we should be allowed to live our lives without being told we can’t marry because we’re gay, that our choices should be respected as long as those choices do not harm another.

The old ‘your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins’ argument.

I believe in freedom to speak free of government regulation, and the responsibility to stand by your words. I believe anonymity is justified in specific circumstances of government oppression or employers using your out of work statements to punish or fire you, but even then it makes me uncomfortable. My discomfort is simply that, my own, and I don’t expect or wish anyone to do much about or with it.

I defined myself as liberal for most of my life. I opposed the Afghanistan invasion and the Iraqi invasion, and was pretty well lambasted for it. It defined me, in a way that I have a hard time putting down in words, my experience as someone who opposed the government’s shoddy, lie-filled arguments for war and for our surrender of our freedoms. That’s more the Benjamin Franklin fanboy in me, I suppose. Those who surrender essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither.

Okay. That probably clears up nothing at all. In the end, I want you to be free to live, as free as everyone else.

I have a blog, I might as well use it

I am not fool enough to believe that my opinion really matters. I express it because not to do so feels painful, not because I expect to change minds or win hearts. I have long since come to the conclusion that humans are not rational beings, that we rationalize what we want to do rather than reason what we should do, and I know that I am a human and just as likely to do so. I am not writing this because I believe there is an argument here to be won.

I simply don’t believe in the state stealing hope directly from people. I cannot understand the majority of citizens in a state, any state, getting together to deliberately take something or the possibility of same away from people. From their neighbors, their friends, their fellow citizens. What happened in North Carolina yesterday was the majority proving John Stewart Mill necessary.

I said elsewhere that those that voted to take marriage away from their fellow citizens were thieves of happiness. They are worse. They are misers, who believe that things they hold which are precious to them are diminished if others experience that precious thing in their turn. They wish to hoard, to hold away. It is not enough that they have a good thing. Others must not have it in order for it to maintain good. They are like children, already having eaten their fill, who then knock the ice cream from another child’s hands merely to prevent that child from knowing how it tastes.

An Inapropriate Spoiler-Heavy Review of The Avengers

Shortest Review – I liked it.

Slightly longer but still short review – It did a very good job of disproving that big action movies have to be stupid, brain numbing, and offensive. It did an excellent job of taking what I dislike about superhero movies, about Joss Whedon’s writing, and about ensemble movies in general and turning those into strengths that I enjoyed.

And now, spoilers atop of spoilers upon more spoilers.

More unfinished stuff set in Nullgate setting

The problem with getting old is that you don’t realize that it happened.

Grimacing, the man in folded plates of metal armor forced himself to ignore the pain in his right shoulder. The bite marks there were shallower than the would have been without the armor, but it still burned. He hoped the damn things didn’t have some kind of venom on those fangs. Without turning his back to any of them, he swung both curved blades in an arc around himself, not trying to make contact. Just to discourage them from getting too close.

Gods I wish I’d been wearing my helmet. Sweat-tangled grey hair hung down, longer than he would have liked it. Around him, the strange whickering, like a horse.

There were four of them, with long lean legs that stood straight below their bodies. They didn’t look at all like predators. If not for the slavering muzzles jammed full of long, narrow teeth, they’d look like lost ponies. Four feet tall at the shoulder, with shaggy fur and black manes that trailed down their backs to become long black tails.

Something out of the Agath forests, he suspected. It didn’t matter, so he didn’t spend time worrying the thought. He kept his left arm out with the blade extended in the classic two-blade style of the Nazreal school he’d learned as a small child. If his teachers could see him sweating and straining, they may well have been ashamed of him.

Nullgate (A fragment)

There was a seaport at Null five hundred years before the Alronians reached it.

The northern coast of Etrea is a singularly unfriendly one. Fjords are treacherous there, filled with shallows, jagged rocks, and several peoples less than open to newcomers. The Naeth who dominate most of the north are hostile in the extreme, and their Aghat and Hentre neighbors have learned to fear Naeth longships, and thus, are none too quick to welcome strangers. All of this was before Alronian triremes made their way into the waters as well, heavy with weapons and quick to use them.

The people of Benar, living as they do on an island to the west of Etrea, require trade to supply them with many things they desire that their island does not supply, such as most kinds of food. The soil of Benar is less soil and more patches of dirt the rocks somehow forgot to infest, and their livestock tends towards the dwarfish cousins of mainland beasts. However they arrived in their isolated home, they have long made the sea provide as much bounty as it could, and as such trade came naturally to them. But they needed a harbour.

Null was not yet named anything when the Alronians sailed into its waters. The Benar sailors had found this large natural harbour, surrounded by steep cliffs on all sides, and had settled in to draw fresh water. From that beginning, people from across the north had found them, and the Benar had done what they could when surrounded by dangerous, aggressive people who had things they wanted. They used the cliffs as fortification, and built lifts to ascend and descend to make deals. There were no portals, passages or gates in the natural wall around the ramshackle seaport, and so the Benar had called their little trading port Nullgate.

Black Sun: What you hide finds you 1

It was supposed to be easy. A small little planet out on the edge of the galactic arm, whirling around  a star no one had claimed or seemed to care about. The six of them would land, snatch up some slaves and pop back out again. No hivequeens would be implicated since they were all ‘exiles’ and couldn’t be traced back to any of the Merchantilians. The locals were supposedly bipedal, with prehensile tails that could be used like a third arm and relatively sharp senses that would make them valuable for guard work once properly conditioned. Hesthet had taken the job after doing her usual research. The money was in mineral wealth, rare metals that could be traded in half a hundred systems. It all seemed perfect.

They’d landed fairly easily. The natives were just figuring out how to use steam, namely because they were so well adapted to their environment that technology had only started developing out of pure curiosity and had no real selection pressure backing it up. Sleek, smooth skin with hundreds of iridescent denticles lining it, they glowed faintly in the amber light of their day. The first four had been easy to catch, they’d walked right up to the ship. There wasn’t much on the planet big enough to eat them. They didn’t fear anything, their huge black eyes blinking curiously as they used their eyelids like strobes to see the ship in UV. Hesthet found them haunting, beautiful as she seized their minds with a thought and forced them to walk into the stasis deck. They were not active – they had no mental defenses – but she could feel the horror in their bright, eager, adaptive minds and it told her that they could probably be broken. Some hive queen somewhere would be getting herself some quality slaves.

“Hest.” Her second, Mrevket, walked around the ship. He was large for a male, with long lean limbs and a lanky face, dotted with fine hairs no matter how often he shaved. Which was often, as she found body hair annoying. “We haven’t heard back from Tren, Nirren or Klahet.”

“I can’t imagine they’ve run into trouble. These things barely understand how to hunt local game.” She pointed to one of the hopping fuzzballs, which was as near as they could tell the most numerous prey item on the local menu. “Unless those three somehow got spooked off of a cliff, they should be fine.”

Just a general “Head’s Up” because I haven’t been using this site or really doing much of anything lately. The Holidays really depressed me, as did my annual No ideology, no matter how positive or negative it is, can be accurate swirling depression. It wasn’t helped by getting into the usual binary internet argument where someone argues not with you, but with a straw man they constructed and makes statements that indicate you can’t realize that all of human society is constructed by humans and thus not truly accurate, in terms of pure truth, without immediately going to live in a cave. I can recognize the limitations of human cognition and reasoning and understand that all ideologies are ultimately invented by humans to give their lives meaning without immediately abandoning human society. Understanding my own limitations doesn’t make me immediately want to abandon my wife and my cats.

Anyway, yes, monstrously depressed, completely in full fledged rejection of every -ism as being ultimately inaccurate, constructions from a limited perspective that do not see the world as it is and never can, and ultimately just tools we use to get through the world for good or ill.  This of course leaves me with the question “What, then, is the right choice of action” in a life very poorly equipped to answer that question. One could argue that the only correct course of action would be to engage in the search for truth while always admonishing oneself that truth cannot be found by a limited intellect that will live at most another 60 years or so, but my word that’s a depressing and exhausting notion. Live your life engaged forever in a struggle you can’t possibly complete searching for a concept that doesn’t actually exist, and which you can never define anyway. Yeah, that sounds like a party.

It’s strange that I feel humans are essentially all self-deluded hoisting flags and banners for whatever causes they favor, all of them wrong. Is that what I’m doing? If it is, what flag am I unfurling? Am I just bitter that I never found one with a really cool border?

Just a man

I wish sometimes that it was like the movies. I hit the wall and stop and feel the back of my head smash into solid, screeching pain. Both my eyes tear up and I can’t hear. It’s my sense of smell that tells me he’s close before he’s on top of me. Rank, sour, wet fur smell. I let my knees quiver out from under me and slide down the wall just enough, and splinters arc in the moon’s light.

I keep falling forward. Now it’s controlled, desperate. I kick off as I drop and slide right between his legs, black fur, soaked from waiting outside for me. I didn’t have anything prepared for this. Naked except for a poorly fitting pair of jeans with blown out knees, the wind and rain stinging my face from the ruined window. He snarls as I kick the back of his knee a lot harder than I should be able to.

A clawed hand tries to disembowel me. My body does the work of getting me out of the way and up to my feet while I can feel blood running down my neck from where I hit. My eyes still won’t clear. Everything is dark, the light from the moon between clouds. There’s no time to do anything fancy. He, or she, hard to tell, drives in that black muzzle and tries to bite my throat out.

I grab it by the neck and lift it squirming off of the floor. Even with my bell rung, I can tell it didn’t expect that.

“I once broke the neck of the Lone-created Bull. I culled the verdant one, and sent back those that death refused.” I’m croaking, which completely ruins the effect. Irritation makes my fingers dig in deeper, flesh squeezed between them, black coarse hairs like spines. “You tell her that I’m insulted. A werewolf? One werewolf? I killed the Wild Hunt and defied Attertag to his face and she sends one werewolf?“

I turn and throw him out the wreck of my window. It’s three floors down, so he won’t really be hurt by the fall, unless he lands on something silver. Does silver actually work? I’m not sure. If I knew where my Lewis Spence was I could look it up. I touch the back of my head and pull my hand away sticky. The back of my head feels like tenderized meat.

Every year I hate this holiday a little more.