mozz

I normally don't even want to get involved in posting a drumbeat of "here's something about Biden staying in the race" stories because, (1) I'm not sure he should, and (2) it doesn't "cancel out" the waste of time that is the incessant drumbeat of articles about how he should drop out. It's like taking uppers to counteract downers; it just doesn't work that way, it makes everything worse. And the amount of press this whole thing is getting and the way it's being presented is absolutely fuckin absurd.

But that being said, I want to post this one because I like Elizabeth Warren quite a lot and I think what she says gets to the core of the issue.

Also, if you are a Democratic politician or donor and you want to replace Biden with someone else, surely talking to the press about how he should drop out without anyone in particular in mind that you're talking to them about as a replacement, and a strategy to get that person into place, should be an absolute last, last, last resort for a way to get that done. And probably not even then.

Biden's thing of "If you want to replace me then mount a challenge at the convention, that's what it's for, and whoever wins, let's fuckin fight the real enemy" makes quite a bit of sense to me, and the longer this goes on, the less sense the people who are talking to the press about him dropping out make.

So here you go, here's a story about someone who thinks he should stay in and what she has to say.

Courtesy ESA Mars Express, via @andrealuck

Since I had literally hundreds of mostly unwanted random creatures in cages for various reasons, I at one point decided to make an effort to make a setup that would pop them out of the cage via a distant lever to greet invading armies. This was, in the end, a totally useless endeavor. The logical place for the cages was inside the water trap, where anything unwelcome was marked for death anyway, and it was a huge hassle every time to set it up, and there was in general no useful effect in any capacity except to add some additional steps before everything drowned. It was sometimes entertaining, of course, which probably is why I kept doing it.

(I also, for some ridiculous reason, became convinced at one point that I could use bugbats in pop-open cages to induce invading armies into chasing the bugbats around up on surface level, so I could manipulate them into going where I wanted them to be. This was incredibly time-consuming to set up, and never worked, not even a little bit, even though I tried it several times. All it did was spread more bugbats around and introduce them in new places. For some reason, though, I kept being convinced that it would work and kept trying. I think by then I was self-deluded by the half-mad desire to make worthwhile the massive sunk costs that had been invested, against my will, into the goddamned bugbats, back before the point I finally decided to exterminate them once and for all.)

So as I said, it was a complete waste of time. There was, however, one of these surprise cage-openings that had an interesting product.

I had captured some kind of powerful enchantress and her assistants, all guilty of some offense against my fortress, and left them in cages for quite some time before deciding that they would make a good pop-out-and-greet-the-goblins squad. I installed them, and when the time came, I popped them out to share a hallway with a forgotten beast, a giant spider, some random cavern riffraff, and a small band of attacking goblins, just to see what would happen.

The result was fairly spectacular. A big magical fog popped into place, and it was like a fight in a Looney Tunes cartoon, all obscured with blood and chunks and spiderwebs arcing out of it periodically, and occasional glimpses of something incredibly unpleasant happening to everything inside. After a short time, the dust cleared, and the only thing that still remained that was any version of alive was:

Four zombies, aligned as friendly to the fortress.

I have no idea how this happened. Nothing that went into the melee had been friendly to the fortress, and none of it was zombies. I'm still to this day not clear on the basics of zombies, to be honest. Were they going to stay friendly? If I turned them loose on an army, would they do anything? Would they maybe turn that invasion into a hundred zombies, all friendly? Or not friendly anymore? Or would that zombie army start out friendly, but then one day turn against my now outnumbered dwarves in a mass, and form a horrifyingly vivid Shakespearean end to the entire fortress?

I had no idea the answers to these questions, and to be honest I still don't. All I knew is that they were zombies, they were friendly, and they were endearingly energetic, sometimes running around pointlessly at tremendous speed inside the water trap in random directions. I have, however, learned to be deeply paranoid about letting anything weird interact with my fortress in any way until I understand it.

I put them in a kind of separated channel / escape tunnel, spending quite a long time attempting (with eventual success) to wash them up and into it with long slow gouts of flood-water, and then locked them in, unsure of what to do with them. I left them there for quite a while, more or less forgotten, while they capered around happily and from time to time freaked me out a little when I saw them and remembered they existed.

As an experiment, I decided to allow one dwarf into the water trap, shut the door, and let one zombie out from captivity, and let them interact with each other, and just see what happened. The answer was: Nothing. Nothing at all. The dwarf wandered aimlessly, the zombie capered around and ignored him, and all was fine.

I genuinely considered just letting them run around in the fortress and be mascots, and actually left the one in the water trap to let him run around freely, sharing the space with fortress dwarves whenever they had business inside the trap, and it went fine. But I could never relax about it. I decided that that insistent voice of caution was there for a reason. I honestly don't remember for sure, but I think I found a way to kill them.

Poor little guys. I really did feel bad about being so suspicious of them; they hadn't shown even a single sign of hostility, and something about their madly pointless sprinting around really was kind of cute. But the other shoe waiting to drop was just too glaringly telegraphed.

I have never seen even a single zombie movie where it turns out at the end it was all a misunderstanding and the zombies just wanted to be friends.

I already posted Frederick Douglass for the 4th, so here's a counter balancing factor: An explicitly pro-American viewpoint talking knowledgeably and at length about leadership and geopolitics, how he likes George Washington and the Boy Scouts, calling the Russian military "pathetic," stuff like that, without being in any way a piece of shit about it. I like Jim Mattis.

Whatever else happens in the coming days with the presidential election, the whole saga will permanently affect my understanding of the culture of The New York Times.

This is the story of one fort, in which I had to completely rebuild the military mostly from scratch three different times. With all parts it is a little long, but it didn't seem to work to separate the pieces. Apologies and hope you enjoy.

Part One: Oops

The first military was unremarkable, not yet well equipped or trained, but I have to say, they came through when it counted.

It was still a young fortress, when one day I saw a lone dwarf accompanied by like 2 skeletons marching purposefully towards the main entrance. Idly wondering if this was related to my mistreatment of the weirdos, I thought about firing up the whole process of getting everyone inside, slamming the gates, and routing him into the long hallway of watery doom. But it was literally one guy. I decided, what the hell, what's the worst that could happen. I simply told my military to go out and kill him, so nobody would have to stop what they were doing.

The fact that it's being written up as a story should tell you whether this proved to be a good idea or not.

They met him right inside the main entrance to the fort, and the first soldier he engaged with suddenly flew back down the entire length of a hallway, exploded into little superscript "2"s and miscellaneous chunks when he hit the far wall, and fell to the floor stone dead. The dude with his retinue began walking into my fortress like the Terminator, effortlessly dismantling anyone who came to meet him, reanimating miscellaneous body parts or organic objects to fight alongside him as he went. It was a fuckin catastrophe. After a moment of panic and despair, watching helplessly as he wandered inexorably through the main hallway and for some reason into the temple section, I decided that just having everyone mob up and attack him what whatever they had to hand was the best I could come up with.

Surprisingly enough, it worked, and they killed him. It sure was a fuckin wake up call for the fortress though. Most of my military was killed or crippled¹, along with quite a few civilian dwarves, and the blood and chunks that decorated the pathway he had taken took quite a while to clean up. I eventually had to tear down a big part of the temple area and rebuild it to get rid of the bloodstains.

Part Two: The Maniac

The fortress, its innocence now well forgotten, survived, and over time rebuilt and thrived. As my metalworking operation got underway for real, and the population grew, I started kitting out multiple squads in iron and steel, and producing high quality weapons. They got capable. I started sending them on expeditionary trips, so they wouldn't get bored or lazy. They weren't really needed that often for defense, since the water trap was perfectly capable to deal with any invasions that arrived.

They excelled. Several members gained legendary skills, I got some artifact weapons and some non-artifacts that had made a name for themselves, among them a lead mace wielded by the leader that had killed several important adversaries. I started trying to get steel for every piece of every set of armor. As I did that I was engaged with quite effectively subjugating the surrounding area, which was fun.

One day, when flicking through my troops checking up on things, I happened to see that one of them was 18 years old, with skills like the result of hacking the save file or something. Legendary, legendary, legendary, legendary, and so on. Well, that's a little surprising. I looked a little closer, and it hit me.

THIS IS THE FUCKIN LITTLE GIRL

The girl from the weirdos. She'd grown up in the fortress alone, and apparently she had found her calling. She still dreamed of bathing the world in chaos. Her psychological profile, already disquieting at the start, had become the stuff of nightmares. I read further.

The former mayor had been her father. I'd killed him in the water trap, and she remembered. She remembered his body slowly rotting away in there, forgotten, as I distractedly tried to sort out some drainage problems. She remembered some other traumatic experiences. Not summarized in bright red in bullet point form was her day-to-day experience of growing up orphaned in the fortress after I'd removed the only allies she'd ever known, but I know the game models friendships and family bonds, of which she at that point would most likely have had none.

Anyway, she had started to love fighting. Like, really love it. Her eyes blazed with pain and anger, and the only thing in the world that supplied her with joy, or gave expression to anything still alive inside her, was to kill.

What the fuck then. Still a child, her abilities at war were already beyond extraordinary. I checked her gear, made sure she had steel everything and a nice warhammer which was her weapon of choice, and customized her job title to "Hammer Maniac." I thought about having her lead a squad, and thought better of it, but decided that overall, if killing goblins was what made her happy then she could have a solid place in my fortress for as long as she still wanted one.

She got her fill of her preferred emotional outlet and then some. I have to say, though, that if you are looking for a happy or fulfilling ending to this story than you are reading about the wrong game. As mentioned before, my military at the time was more or less always either going to or coming back from mauling some poor outpost or settlement, and inducing them to send me conscripts or wagonloads of low quality booty. And so, it was inevitable that them returning from one of these would overlap with a goblin siege.

The timing and positioning was impeccably terrible. My entire military, the young maniac included, came back one dwarf at a time and immediately into the jaws of the entire goblin army. I attempted to shut the entrances and open up a faraway gate, to route them in a different direction and around the danger, but I only had one chance and sort of messed it up and bottom line, it didn't work.

I watched as, one by one, my soldiers encountered solitarily the entire weight of the goblin army, which devoured them like a sparrow eating a series of crumbs. Several of them were extraordinary fighters, who went into martial trances and cut deep swathes of dead goblins before they were overwhelmed from all sides, but it didn't make a difference. The little hammer wielder went into a trance as well, cutting a deep pathway of bodies like a lawnmower going through tall grass, but eventually was overwhelmed and died like all the rest. I never got a chance to find out what she was growing into.

This started a yearslong period of simply shutting all the gates and hiding in the fortress. I disliked doing it but it was literally all I could do. With about a hundred goblins outside the walls at all times, I explored the caverns, did extensive construction, set up some automated systems for necessary goods, and tinkered with the fortress. My population during this time was permanently fixed, and literally every single dwarf with the physical or mental configuration for fighting was a corpse outside my walls with the goblins stomping around on top of what used to be them. I thought about trying to build a tower for shooting down on the goblins, or otherwise trying to fight them without an army, but in the end I couldn't arrive at anything realistic and simply had to wait for years until they at last got bored and went away. Which, eventually, they did.

Part Three: Bears

In the aftermath of my long hermitage, migrant caravans for some reason never came back. I still don't know what that's about. I wasn't especially vulnerable to attack, thanks to the big water trap and an abundance of caution, but my military now was a pitiful thing built up from all the dwarves that had been rejected from multiple rounds of selections for military #2, and newcomers to replenish their numbers were nonexistent.

However. Once, out of idle curiosity, I had purchased some grizzly bears from an elf caravan. I can highly recommend this decision. If you ever see some bears, get the bears. Get the fucking bears. Black bears aren't good for much, but if you see grizzlies, pay any price.

The grizzly bears hung out, in a big room I made for them, and slowly their numbers accumulated, and out of curiosity I trained some of them for war, and as my Mighty Ducks military was getting slowly to be experienced and halfway capable, I started allocating two bears to each soldier.

Let me tell you, if you ever want to win your battles, this is a wonderful way to do it.

A squad of ten mediocre dwarves and twenty well-trained grizzly bears is, as far as I can tell, indestructible to any normal military threat. I was not able to simply click on whatever city I wanted and have them go over and fuck it up. But, almost. And with a sloppy modicum of planning, my grizzly cavalry started going out and fucking up the landscape far more effectively than the legendary earlier squads had been able to.

The only fly in the ointment was having to marshal every single bear to accompany every expeditionary force, when a single stuck bear somewhere in the fortress was enough to delay the adventure indefinitely, until six months later I realized they should have gotten back, and after some searching found the single outlier that was trapped behind a door or something with everyone waiting until he arrived before they could get started. I never arrived at a sure way to prevent this.

But other than that they excelled. They laid waste to the landscape. I started being able to demand additional dwarves, from my defeated places, which helped the population. I swear that at one point I saw a bear become administrator of one of my holdings. I think that is impossible. I think I was just mixing up names or something. But I swear that is what I thought I saw.

So this is the current state of my fortress's military, with a quite large room full of bears ready to go to any city or fuck up any comers. There was also a hilarious incident where a diplomat got into a punch-up with some members of the fortress, and when blows started coming back his way, he ran for safety and took a wrong turn, and entered the bears room. Oops. He was never seen again by anyone, which doubtless upset whatever civilization he came from.

Whatever man. It was his fault. If he didn't want to become pieces, he shouldn't have punched that guy and then went where all the bears are.

Bottom line: Get some bears. Bears are where it's at.

¹ I slightly misremembered in an earlier story. Incident #1 was what crippled the hero dwarf who later became the main cook and had a third career as a crutch-wielder. From the debacle that happened to the second military, there were no survivors, none at all.