I've long been interested in the intersection of politics and religion. It was particularly on display this past week at the Democratic National Convention, where each session opened and ended with one or more member of the clergy leading a prayer. As with all American political events, every major speech ended with some variation of "May God bless the United States of America." The final night, in its video biography of Joe Biden, went into some detail on his personal Catholic faith and showed his interactions with pastors from other faith traditions.
And, of course, the Democratic party is widely considered the less religious of the two major parties. I fully expect that the Republican convention next week will contain considerably more religiously-charged language throughout the event.
It's somewhat fortuitous that these events fell while I finished a book about another, far more intense relationship between politics and religious: the role of the Christian church in Nazi Germany. More than a year ago my dad recommended the book Preaching in Hitler's Shadow. Edited by Dean G. Stroud and published in 2013, this is an amazing book that focuses on the sermons preached by members of the Confessing Church and other antifascist German pastors during the time between the 1932 elections (when the Nazi party won a plurality of votes) and the end of WW2.
There is a fairly long and very well-written introduction introducing the historical context of the situation in Germany at the time. Stroud had initially intended to write a book about the sermons, but eventually decided to focus on the sermons themselves; fortunately, he presents all of his research in a very coherent and thoughtful way. I had only a very vague understanding of what was happening in the German church: I had seen photos of churches with swastikas surrounding altars and pulpits, knew that the Pope Pius has been criticized for failing to speak out against Hitler, and was familiar with Bonhoeffer's role in the Confessing Church.
As one might expect, there was a huge range of responses to the Nazis. The dominant group at the time was a group called the German Christian movement; Stroud notes the confusion of the name and reserves "German Christian" for that faction while saying "Christians in Germany" or other phrases for the broader church. The German Christians were heavily influenced by anti-semitic and pro-Aryan thoughts, well in advance of Hitler's chancellorship but even more so afterwards. They "modernized" Christian theology by eliminating the Old Testament and Paul's epistles to expunge Jewish influences from the Bible. In the remaining New Testament, Jewish people are cast as the villains, oppressing an Aryan Jesus; in the present day, they believed, they could finally avenge Jesus's death and create a pure Germanic Christianity. (This theology bears some eerie similarities to the Levitican theology in Neal Stephenson's "Fall": Jesus's sacrifice is a weakness, and Jesus must be strong, so the central tenet of Christianity is discarded, and a new faith is declared built around power.)
(Oh, and one other tie-in to recent reading: It wasn't until the appendix that I realized that German pastors actually had their salary paid by the state. That was surprising to me, and made me rethink a lot about their situation. It reminded me of trifunctional societies, as presented by Thomas Piketty in Capital & Ideology, where there's a balance between the warrior aristocracy class and the scholarly clergy class: in Germany, clergy (clerics / clerks) performed some administrative functions for the state, including recording births, deaths, and so on. As usual, I find that my American upbringing can make me kind of blind to how common it was to not have a separation between church and state.)
The German Christian movement went to great lengths to ingratiate itself to Hitler, seeking to unify all of the disparate Protestant churches under a single, powerful, "positive" umbrella, and going so far as requiring all pastors to swear a loyalty oath to Hitler. Ironically, Hitler didn't seem to care about this at all: for all the GC's fawning and obsequiousness, Hitler only had contempt for Christianity, whether German or otherwise. He paid some lip service to Christian traditions and values in the first year after his election, as he consolidated political support and power, but for the most part he didn't believe the church was a threat to worry about or an asset worth controlling.
Fortunately, plenty of other pastors within Germany disagreed, and the bulk of the book is devoted to their words: entire sermons, translated from the German, preached at great personal risk to flocks under the watchful eye of the authoritarian Nazi state. These pastors were variously interrogated, beaten, exiled, thrown into concentration camps, or murdered by the state. The courage of these people alone is inspiring, as merely speaking out carried enormous risk. But they didn't "merely speak out": they spoke with incredibly strong, prophetic words, with great care and skill, battling for the soul of their nation.
One of my favorite things about this book is how it focuses on language: in the introduction and the footnotes, Stroud draws attention to not merely what the pastors were saying but how they were saying it. They were operating in an incredibly charged linguistic atmosphere: Nazi theorists and propagandists took language very seriously, and intentionally bent words and phrases to shape the minds and actions of the German people. Pastors, and particularly those who follow expository preaching, seem to be in a uniquely strong position to counter this threat of the Nazification of the German language, minds, culture and society. I walked away from this book with an image of these pastors doing rhetorical battle against the poisonous words of the Nazis, using their own words to draw distinctions between the Gospel and National Socialism, or to ironically comment on Nazi obsessions, or just make people think about what they heard and said.
One way Stroud does this is by keeping particularly charged words untranslated in the text: throughout the sermons, he notes where pastors used words like Volk or Reich, which carried enormous weight in Nazi propaganda. Depending on the context, pastors sometimes subverted these Nazi thoughts, as when they noted that the Jewish people are also a Volk, or when they draw attention to the Reich of heaven. Some of the footnotes could be distracting, but those in-line notations are especially welcome.
The earliest sermons are from some of the most familiar names: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth and Martin Niemoller. I recognized the name Karl Barth but didn't really know anything specific about him; fortunately, each sermon has a brief introduction that introduces the pastor's biography and theology and what they were doing in Nazi Germany. Barth was a very important figure in founding the Confessing Church, and long after the war was one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century. Throughout his career he was a proponent of what was called "neo-orthodoxy", which was a reaction against liberal theology and sought to refocus attention on the actual text of scripture. Reading his biography and sermon reminded me that my left/right division isn't very useful. Nazis were a very right-wing movement, and neo-orthodoxy seems like a conservative (even, in a non-pejorative sense, reactionary) movement; but these movements weren't at all aligned with one another. It's awesome to see how the strong convictions of neo-orthodoxy gave its proponents a strong spine in resisting Nazism, a spine that was often missing from people without strong convictions.
My single favorite sermon in the collection is probably "A Sermon about Kristallnacht" that was preached by Helmut Gollwitzer on the Sunday after Kristallnacht. Mere days before the Nazis had led a pogrom across all of Germany, smashing the windows of Jewish stores, destroying synagogues, ransacking and looting houses, beating and murdering Jews. His sermon opens on page 118 with "Who then on this of all days still has a right to preach? Who then should be preaching repentance on such a day? Have not our mouths been muzzled on this very day? Can we do anything but fall silent? What good has all the preaching and the hearing of sermons done us and our people and our church? ... What do we expect God to do, if we come to him now singing, reading our Bibles, praying, preaching, and confessing our sins as if we can really count on his being here and on all this being more than empty religious activity? Our impertinance and presumption must make him sick. Why don't we at least just keep our mouths shut? Yes, that might be the right thing to do. What if we just sat here for an entire hour without saying a word, no singing, no speaking, just preparing ourselves silently for God's punishment, which we have already earned?"
(Transcribed by hand, please excuse typos.)
The whole thing is great, but to just pick out another passage on 122, he continues with "It is inside us all; this truth that upright men and women can turn into horrible beasts is an indication of what lies hidden within each of us to a greater or lesser degree. All of us have done our part in this: one by being a coward, another by comfortably stepping out of everyone's way, by passing by, by being silent, by closing our eyes, by laziness of heart that only notices another's need when it is openly apparent, by the damnable caution that lets itself be prevented from every good deed, by every disapproving glance and every threatening consequence, by the stupid hope that everything will get better on its own without our having to become courageously involved ourselves."
Throughout the sermon, he doesn't just condemn the actions of the attackers and the silent complicity of all Germans: he calls to scripture, specifically John the Baptist, using gospel words to highlight the evil of what had transpired and was still happening. Near the end on page 124 he rhetorically asks "'What then should we do?' In answer John the Baptist places your neighbor right before your eyes just at the moment of forgiveness. The unwillingness to repent destroys the bridge leading to your neighbor. Repentance rebuilds this bridge. This neighbor does not excel in any way that would cause the world to find him worthy of help -- nowhere is it said that he deserves our help. Nowhere are we told that between him and you there is a common bond of race or a people (Volk) or special interests or class or sympathy. He can only point to one thing, and it is that one thing that makes that person your neighbor -- he lacks what you have. You have two cloaks, he has none; you have something to eat, he has nothing to eat; you have protection, he has lost all protection; you have honor, honor has been taken away from him; you have a family and friends, he is completely alone; you still have some money, his is all gone; you have a roof over your head, he is homeless. In addition to all this, he has been left to your mercy, left to your greed (see yourself in the example of the tax collector!), and left to your sense of power (see yourself today in the example of the soldier!)."
These pastors were not preaching into a vaccuum, either politically or theologically. On page 81, Paul Schneider comments during a sermon "Let us never say that this
does not concern us, for the German Christian Faith Movement is now
claiming to be the religion of all Germans."
That aisde really resonated with
me. It feels very unfair to feel pressured to denounce people who others
see as sharing your community who you don't agree with; think of the
demands for Muslim politicians in America to denounce terror attacks carried out by ISIS, or for
Christian churches to denounce Westboro Baptist. You naturally think, "Those people aren't like me, and I resent the implication that I'm responsible for them and being grouped together with them." But, I think it's important when the faction in question is in power or is ascendent. During my lifetime, the "Moral Majority" and other Christian groups in America have claimed to speak on behalf of all Christians, and presented a version of Christianity that is almost unrecognizable to me: pro-war, anti-love, embracing guns and vengeance instead of mercy and sacrifice. I think we can safely ignore the small fringe groups, but when someone claims to speak for all Christians and has a large megaphone, it's important for everyone's sake for other Christians to make clear that this is not true.
The pastors in this book choose many different ways to speak out. Many pastors strike at the overall Nazi ideology, or the heresies of the German Christian movement, pitting systems of ideas against one another. Other pastors speak out against specific actions, as with the urgent sermons in the aftermath of Kristallnacht and the invasion of Poland. They're biblical sermons, anchored in scripture, but they don't shy away from denouncing the particular offenses taken by the Third Reich. Reading these reminded me of how some churches in the United States during Christmas have erected nativity scenes with Jesus, Mary and Joseph encased in separate cages, bearing powerful witness to the atrocities we are committing at the border as we tear families apart. Lots of people in America in 2020 were outraged by these Nativity scenes, and talked about how churches should stay out of politics, which is all distressingly similar to how many Germans criticized anti-Nazi pastors in the 1930s who spoke out against the evils being done in their own country.
We have separation of church and state in America, which I think is a good thing that protects both institutions from each other. But being separate from the government does not mean being separate from the people or the nation. For some time now, many people have thought of religious speech as being diametrically opposed to secular action, talking as a replacement for doing. "Thoughts and prayers" is the common soporific in America, inviting people to divert their energies away from meaningful change and into useless navel-gazing. But, it doesn't have to be this way. Later in life Helmut Gollwitzer said of preaching that "In no other form of speech are things taken so seriously, is our whole existence so challenged, even put at risk. In no form of speech does our word itself so much take the form of action, of intervention in the history of hearers, as in this." (page 115). Think of the powerful sermons from people like Martin Luther King Jr. or Dr. William Barber. Their speech spark literal movements, and, as Helmut implies, are a form of action, a kind of pushing that demands response. To be sure, not every sermon or preacher rises to this level, but this form of speech is capable of it, a divine intervention into earthly affairs that can shock us out of our complacency and move us to do what we must do.
I started a little hobby project that turned into a midsized hobby project, and now it's done! Probably!
Lexencrypt is a word jumble, kind of. The letters in the grid constantly shift and cycle, and the initial impression is probably a bit disorienting. But as time progresses, a pattern eventually emerges, and the hidden word will begin to reveal itself. Find the word, type it in, and advance to the next board.
Or something like that! I've had a hard time describing the game when I write the summaries for the app stores, which is always a great sign. Personally I find the experience of playing it a little like solving one of those "magic eye" pictures, where it can help to relax and unfocus your eyes. Or you can take a more methodical approach, sweeping your eyes across row by row until you find a string of letters that form a word.
I slapped together a bare-bones version of the game for my birthday party earlier this summer, and have just pushed out the first update, which turns it into more of a proper game. It now has simple sound effects, tracks your game stats, and, most importantly, saves your game as you progress. There are some new surprises to find for people who make it deep enough inside.
Lexencrypt is available for free on Google Play and the App Store! Below, some typical ramblings on how I got here.
The origin of Lexencrypt was the title screen for a game called "Something Strange" that I wrote back in high school. That was a QBasic game, and like almost all of my games of that era it was a text adventure. I wanted to do something fun for the title screen, though, so I made a little text thing that would randomly fill the screen with letters, constantly cycling between them; but when a letter in the right position randomly rotated to the right character, it would turn white and freeze in place. So you would be left with the words "SOMETHING STRANGE" standing still in the center of the screen, while all around it the alphabet roiled and pulsed.
Many years later, when I was first learning Android development, I whipped up a game called "Nonsense" based around the same concept. I would pull a random word from the dictionary, pick a random place on the screen to place it, and then start flipping characters. Over time the tiles would land on the right letter, and you would then type it in to win. I added a sense of progression to it; I forget now what all I did, but I think I started using different colors or something, and would also start playing music (from MediaStore!) once you got deep enough.
The first physical Android device was the G1, which was a terrible device to develop for: it had a touchscreen and a trackball and a slide-out keyboard. But Nonsense was, I think, pretty fun to play on that phone; the keyboard made it feel natural to tap out the answer once you found it.
This would have been back in... 2008 or 2009, maybe? I'd completely forgotten about it until a friend recently reminded me of it back in the spring, so it's one of the things that I thought of when pulling things together for my birthday party.
I decided to use the game as an excuse to learn Flutter, a newish development platform. I'm generally highly skeptical of "write once run everywhere" systems, but in this particular case it made a lot of sense: my party guests were a mix of Android and iPhone folks, and while I could have taken the opportunity to finally learn Swift, I instead opted to pick up Dart (my micro-review: I would like it a lot more if I didn't already know Kotlin) and add the possibility of making a web app version.
Like most times I've learned a new platform, I started off with the sample app and then just kept adding things and changing stuff. I'm sure that my code style is garbage, and I wouldn't ever use it as a showcase, but it is a lot of fun and feels gratifying to just hack around and make something new.
While working on it, I mercilessly cut out all features that didn't feel absolutely essential to my core delivery for the party: multiple boards to advance, and eventually launching a new URL to continue the scavenger hunt. Even with that minimal portfolio, it took a ridiculous amount of time to make. I kept a list of things that I wanted to do if I ever wanted to polish this up.
It was pretty interesting to think about all the differences between this app and the much older one. A surprising difference is that this one feels slower, despite today's chips being significantly more powerful than in 2008. Part of that might be the Flutter runtime, part might be the significantly larger screen resolutions pushing more pixels. I might have been drawing on a raw Canvas back in 2008 but I honestly can't remember. Anyways, I got it to a point that I was pretty happy with, using some tricks that I almost definitely wasn't using over a decade ago.
Releasing the app was pretty fun, and went a heck of a lot smoother than I expected. I'd heard horror stories about the Apple app review process, but it wasn't too bad at all for me. I did get held up pretty early on by a request for a video demonstrating how my app was used; that definitely makes sense, as it's (somewhat intentionally) kind of disorienting when you first open it. I used the built-in iPhone screen recorder to make a movie of using the app, with the microphone turned on to capture my voice talking through what it was doing, then uploaded that to an unlisted YouTube video and included a link in my Test Flight submission. Once that was in, I was approved for beta testing in less than a day, and once I applied for release to the app store, I think it took less than 12 hours.
Google Play is, as always, a different beast, run by implacable robots instead of humans. This submission actually took quite a bit longer than before; back in the day Google was (in)famous for being the Wild West and letting any random app up, but these days they run tons of automated tests and malware scans and stuff. It's still just a couple of hours, though.
After taking a break to digest all the sausage and cake I ate on my birthday, I've been continuing to work on the game over nights and weekends, running down that list of deferred features from before. I'm getting (slightly) better at grokking the Flutter-y way of doing things and can phrase my Google searches more effectively, which has significantly sped up my progress.
There's still more that I could do, of course - there are an infinite number of Ideas in the world - but I'm pretty satisfied with where things are at now: simplicity can be good, and there's a nice variety of things happening up through level 50, which feels like enough to keep people busy for a good while. This seems like a good stopping point for development, barring any bugs or other unexpected events.
This was a fun little one-off experiment, a far cry from both my usual personal game projects and my usual professional app projects. I doubt I'll do much like this in the future, but it was good to stretch some muscles that I haven't used in a while and make a thing. And, heck, maybe I'll revisit this concept again in 2032 and make yet another version!
I had a milestone birthday this summer. It turns out that 2020 is not a great year for celebrations!
I'd started vaguely thinking late last year about what, if anything, to do for the occasion. For the last couple of years I haven't done any events, instead opting for solo backpacking trips or marathon gaming sessions or other low-key "me time" events. But it seemed appropriate to mark the occasion somehow. I started to think through some possibilities: maybe renting out some venue (an arcade? a park?) or just crashing at Crissy Field for a come-as-you-are thing.
Needless to say, COVID put all that on ice. Like a lot of people, I think I was in denial at first, hopefully thinking that "Oh, if this is all over by May, then people will be relieved to see each other in person again, and my party could be a great opportunity to do that!" And I felt very fortunate that I hadn't made any big plans yet; I feel really badly for people who planned 2020 weddings or otherwise had sunk a lot of time or money into something that COVID took away.
At a certain point, I finally accepted reality: no matter what government regulations were or weren't in place, the virus definitely would still be around, and people wouldn't want the hugs and homemade cake I had planned. (Well, maybe some people would, but those same people would be the riskiest ones to be around.)
By this time, though, I'd gotten attached to the idea of having a proper birthday celebration. At some level, it felt like it would be giving up to fall back to my traditional low-key solo outing. And, with everyone's social lives so constrained, I thought it would be more important than ever to have an opportunity to bring people together. One of the hardest things for me about the COVID era has been the monotony: days seem to bleed into each other, with so little changing in my daily experiences, and I find myself really starved for novelty and experiences. So, if I could somehow make an experience for others, then that might be something they'd enjoy. And in the meantime it would give me something to do other than get mad at politics!
I brainstormed for a while about what to do. The obvious solution was "Host a Zoom call," but I was pretty leery of it. I've been getting pretty burned out on Zoom, and I'm sure lots of other people are too. And the scenario just seemed kind of depressing to me: opening a laptop and seeing a dozen people in tiny little squares on the screen, all staring at each other and doing the awkward "Hi! Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you, can you hear me?" thing.
But, I definitely did want to see other people, so some sort of video chat would be a very welcome component. I started to mull over the dynamic of a traditional physical birthday party and how I could adapt some of that experience to cyberspace. Everyone doesn't all show up at your front door at the exact same minute: there's usually a gradual ebb and flow, from early birds through late stragglers. There are clumps of people talking with each other. There's music, and food, and lots of chatter.
The more I thought about it, I really liked the idea of some sort of staggered arrival to a video call. What if there was some sort of activity for my guests, a game or something, that would lead into the video? That would add more variety and fun, and also lend a nice cadence to the day. I flashed back to some of my earliest childhood birthday parties, which featured scavenger hunts, with each guest hunting for treasures and all coming together at the end for cake. That sounded perfect!
As I brainstormed more, I gradually came to realize that what I was doing was really creating a game. The overall process for putting together my birthday party was shockingly similar to how I made my Shadowrun campaigns. I had a big ole' Google Doc where I mapped out the stages, the overall arc of the experience, various ideas I had. As the idea was refined I edited it more and more tightly, stripping out bad ideas and foregrounding the fun ones. I created a burndown checklist of all the tasks I had to complete to pull this off, which grew for some time before gradually diminishing. I made a separate Google Doc for the copy, writing fiction and instructions and all the narrative glue to pull things together.
That narrative ended up being pretty fun. This part actually ended up being a little backwards: in my Shadowrun games, I often zero in on a story relatively early on and then build out missions to support that story. For my birthday, I had all the missions planned first, then realized that it might be annoying to just say "Do this, and then do that!", so I whipped together a lighthearted and silly story to tie everything together. Which, amusingly, is much closer to how AAA game development typically works, with the writers brought in to the process after everything else is done.
Anyways... here are some highlights! Let's see... I think I'll focus on the order of how people experienced this, versus the order of preparation.
I sent out an evite invitation to the party. I don't think I've ever sent an evite before, but I receive them decently often. It's what I would have used for a physical party, and I think it helped set the tone.
Evite isn't a great site, and has really annoying ads and upselling (and upselling to remove ads), but it worked pretty well. It's simple, everyone already knows it, and it's easy to track what's going on.
Actually, I take that back: One thing evite is really bad at is RSVPs. For typical parties it doesn't matter at all, you just need a ballpark number while preparing and want to encourage people to come at the last minute. But in my case, I had logistics to consider. I needed to mail out physical supplies, which meant I would need to mail everything a week in advance, which meant I would need to order everything several weeks in advance, which meant I would need to know exactly who was coming early-ish. But evite doesn't have any support for requiring RSVPs by a certain date. After some Googling, I learned that their suggested work-around was to limit the number of guests to the number who had accepted by your decided day. Which seems hacky, but whatever!
So, yes: shipping! I decided to make use of the US Postal Service while we still have it. There are some extremely affordable Flat Rate boxes, but the stuff I had in mind wouldn't fit on one of those. Fortunately, they do also have (free!) Priority Mail boxes, which are a bit more expensive (they're charged based on weight and distance instead of dimensions), but not ridiculously so. I got 17 "4" boxes for my 33 guests and started packing!
While this pandemic definitely sucks, we are very fortunate to be living in 2020 and not 1950 or even 1990. I was able to do pretty much everything online and through the mail. The USPS mailed me empty boxes for free, I packed them up at home, bought postage through USPS.com, scheduled a pickup, laid out all of the boxes by my mailbox, then several hours later someone came by to pick them up. No visits to the post office, no flagging down a carrier, everything was very efficient and socially distanced.
Inside the box, guests would find a cheerful and colorful warning sign, keyed to their personal time zone, about when the festivities would begin.
I printed these at... Office Max, I think? The per-sheet prices were extremely reasonable; the shipping was more expensive than the printing itself, but I was happy to pay to minimize my exposure risk.
After the stated time expired, guests opened their boxes, and found goodies inside!
The shipping manifest included:
One or more lei
One or more birthday party hat
A heartfelt typed letter from yours truly
Four sheets of paper with lines and circles on them
A Mysterious Treasure Chest with a 3-digit padlock
I bought most of the party favor things from Michael's. The heartfelt typed letter was also printed from Office Max. The treasure chest was really fun, and something I spent a long time sourcing. I had a very specific idea in mind, which would require a small box with a small but usable lock. I spent multiple hours researching until I stumbled across an excellent box at Michael's, which was also shockingly cheap ($3.49 per chest!). I bought the padlocks separately, which were also pretty cheap, but I had to buy from multiple vendors since no single seller had as many as I needed.
Around this time I started getting some confused text messages: "Where's the Zoom link?" I gave a few hints and nudges, but most guests figured it out on their own: it's Puzzle Time!
The first phase involved aligning the sheets of paper with lines and circles over the heartfelt typed letter. Tiny holes cut into the paper provided a screen into the underlying letter, eventually revealing the hidden communication: a URL!
Making this was one of many time-consuming elements of party prep, but was a lot of fun. I used an X-Acto knife to cut out the desired characters from one of the letters, taped to a sturdy piece of paperboard. I then used the paperboard as a template to cut out more characters from stacks of letters. I could do about 7 sheets of (flimsy) paper at a time, though my knife was getting pretty dull by the end!
I used two of the pieces of paper for each letter, then used a ruler and a coaster and some crayons to make my marks. Most of the markings went on the paper, with some of the edges marked on the underlying letter. The recipients would then align the edges with the paper to restore it to the original position. I included a couple of dummy papers too to keep it from getting too easy.
And, what was at that URL? More puzzles!
I'd overthought this landing page. Since I was mailing out the packages in advance, I was somehow worried that, like, some people would start working on the puzzles days before and get through it too early, having an unfair advantage over people who waited. What a dumb worry! This wasn't a competitive game or anything, and folks have better things to do than defy the wishes of the birthday boy. But, in order to prevent this imagined scenario, I added a content gate (again, my video-game-author instincts kicking into play). I asked a question that would be keyed to the day of my birthday. That morning, I would update the back-end with the correct answer, so nobody would be able to proceed before I was ready
.
For the record, I am not a web developer. I think the last time I made an HTML page was back in the 1990s, and my web skills are still at about that level. Still, since this wasn't a professional gig, I had a lot of fun with it. For the tech, I used Ktor, a Kotlin framework for web development, along with FreeMarker for templatized web pages. Everything was done with static content and URL redirects, no cookies or sessions or any storage. I hosted the site on Heroku, and, boy, I can see why it's so popular! Even with practically zero experience in dev ops it was a breeze to manage deployments. I purchases some novelty one-off domain names from Google Domains and pointed them at my Heroku apps. All in all I think I spent $8.03 on Heroku (one month of a hobby dynamo to get SSL, plus a tiny amount for traffic) and $12 for each Google domain (good for a year but I won't be renewing).
The "plot", such as it is, kicks in soon after this. The nefarious intellectual property lawyers from Hasbro, Inc. are furious at my reckless infringement of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles copyright, and I have gone into hiding to evade them.
One big goal of mine while planning this out was to bring guests through a multitude of different channels and experiences, again evoking an old-fashioned treasure-hunting ethos that brings you through different environments, and also giving some more novelty to the experience and hopefully some moments of delight. In some ways I thought of this "game" as being a little like an ARG, weaving together various physical-world and digital-world venues with different clues people would follow as they hopped between them and followed the trail. There were a few big differences, though. ARGs are designed to be really hard to solve and take a long time, while I really wanted everyone to get through in an hour or so and had some decidedly non-tech-savvy folks on my invite list. ARGs also tend to encourage collaboration, while this game was more solo.
But, not TOO solo! I wanted to make sure that, early on, I could bring the guests together digitally, to get some of that sense of cooperation and collaboration, and also to give me a graceful opportunity to provide hints to people who were getting stuck. So, after solving the first couple of puzzles, I brought people into a private Discord server.
The event was scheduled to start at noon PST, and I was poised at my laptop throughout: one window open to the Zoom meeting where everyone would wind up at the end, and my Discord window open. I stared at it, wondering when the first people would come in. 12:05 rolled by. Zero people had made it. 12:10 came and went. Still zero people. I felt a sense of dread rising within my stomach. "This is just like the Antumbra offices all over again! I made the opening stages too hard! Nobody will make it here! They've probably all given up already! This is a terrible birthday party!"
And then, at 12:11, the first guest arrived: my good friend Josh from high school! He was followed seconds later by a current friend from work, and then more soon after. It was pretty remarkable that folks all over the country, from the west coast to the east coast, independently working on the same puzzles, completed them in almost the exact same amount of time.
I'd initially planned to do more game-y stuff within the Discord; my concept was to have a bot that you would chat with, and who would eventually send you on your way. After a lot of research, I eventually determined that I couldn't do exactly what I wanted, at least not without a lot more coding than I was willing to do. (Oddly enough, Slack and Discord could each do half of what I wanted: having a bot automatically communicate with you when you joined a channel, and having a bot respond to what you say in a private conversation with it.)
But it all worked out well. There was some good chatter in the main channel, and it was fun to see people gradually pop in as time went on: again, it had the cadence of a "real" party, which was exactly what I wanted. It was fun to see some people be prompt, and others arrive to see lots of activity.
The main meat, though, was a private message that the MEE6 bot would send, pointing them towards their next puzzle.
I have to admit that I am not a regular Discord user. At some point I'll probably get on it for real since more and more of my favorite game companies and communities seem to be moving there, but I am still stuck in my ways. Anyways, I poked around for a bit for various bots, the MEE6 one did the most of what I wanted and was easy to configure. It just sent this welcome message to everyone who joined the server, providing some more flavor text to the "quest" and pointing them towards two things: a Google Photos album and another URL to continue.
The album included a bunch of beautiful nature shots, all taken from the same backpacking trip. But what trip?
Some folks who know me very well, or who are big fans of Lord of the Rings, could probably guess it quickly. Others, though, could use the magnifying glass to zoom in on the writing of one particular photo, which would bring them within a Google search of the answer.
And, from here, they would (most likely) have to use Google Maps (or an old-fashioned atlas or something) to find what specific town near the track I was "hiding" in.
This eventually segued into another bit of fiction, as "I" have "escaped" from New Zealand and am returning back to the States.
The Donatello shout-out here was a late addition. As in my video games, I try to keep some narrative coherence, and periodically remind my players of the overarching plot arc. This was an extremely silly "plot", but I still think it was kind of fun, and it tickled me to remind my guests of the very low stakes. And, in a weird way, it almost felt kind of like character development... for me. (For the record, I was a huge fan of the Ninja Turtles as a kid, and hadn't thought about them at all for decades, and think fondly of them now and listen to their official podcast.)
The next puzzle comes up soon: a long playlist appears, and the guest is challenged to figure out what one song in it doesn't belong.
This was one of my favorite kind of puzzles, with many possible approaches and solutions. You can just brute-force your way through it. Wrong guesses aren't really penalized, although they did result in this menacing warning.
A simple scan through the playlist will almost immediately reveal the theme: the vast majority of songs are about California, and, heck, have California in the title. Some of them are more subtle: Free Fallin' doesn't have any California places in its title, but the lyrics do ("Livin' in Reseda", "Down Ventura Boulevard", "Over Mulholland"). But you could narrow the possibilities down pretty quickly, then either listen to them, or crunch through them.
It was pretty important for me to have a music portion to the party. Like I said before, I was trying to recapture some of the essence of a party, and music is a big party of that. I actually had a checklist of stuff I wanted to do: music, food, movies, games, chatting. I'd built out an entire movie puzzle that was oriented around the 80s movie The Wizard before cutting it out near the end; once again, I think my experience in "game development" has helped me evaluate this stuff and ask basic-but-easily-overlooked questions like "Is this as fun for people to play as it is for me to make?"
The solution to this puzzle was "The El" by Rhett Miller. I'm pretty pleased with that: most of my guests are either from California, and thus have a leg up on recognizing California place names, or from Chicago, and thus have some experience with the El. (And "The El" does, at a glance, look like it could be a Spanish name, in line with other items on this playlist.)
Curating this list was pretty fun. I did a lot of searching in Spotify and on Google to build up a big list, then gradually whittled it down to a smaller-but-still-longish playlist that would take about two and a half hours to listen straight through. I think maybe a third of the songs on there are ones that I'd never heard before. I tried to represent a mix of genres and time periods, but also cut out everything I hated. In the end I think there are only two songs on there that I really love ("California" by Grimes and "I Remember California" by R.E.M.), but there are a lot of bangers; I became particularly fond of the opening guitar lick of Sausalito Summernight and the bouncy fun of San Luis Obispo.
From the music puzzle, guests proceeded to the next part of the game: an actual honest-to-goodness game!
This was probably the most ridiculous, indulgent part of the whole project, to write an entire game from scratch, but I was dedicated to the idea: I love games, and programming, so I thought it would be fun to put something together.
I'll probably include a separate post about this later. It's a very simple and completely non-narrative game, sort of a word jumble type of thing. I used it as an excuse to learn Flutter, a newish cross-platform development ecosystem, and wrote my first-ever iOS app and first-ever web app. I had to be really strict about feature creep and do the bear minimum to make sense for my party, since as ever there's an infinite number of improvements you can make to any game.
But, yeah, it was totally unnecessary and fully satisfying to go through the whole process of releasing a new game to Google Play and the App Store, just so a dozen or so people could use it as a step along the scavenger hunt! The web site directed them to the App Store, they would download and install the game, play it for a few stages, then a new button would appear, they would tap that, and be taken forward into the next stage of the hunt!
(For the record, that's an animated GIF above. Most but not all of the Turtle content in the hunt was animated.)
This led into another "content gate". I probably overthought the "security" aspects of my treasure hunt; the odds of some random person playing my totally unadvertised game during the few hours that easter egg / backdoor were open was astronomically low. Still, I didn't want randos stumbling into my precious birthday party! So, since this link was accessible to anyone who played my game, I had guests verify information that came with their physical box. This is something that could theoretically be brute-forced, since, again, I wasn't really doing any session tracking or anything fancy on the server; so I also added a free-form text field, sowing doubt in the mind of a hypothetical hacker that even running through every possible combination would yield a correct solution.
Getting this wrong would lead to yet another warning. The list of my adversaries grows larger and broader!
This line eventually led to a numeric and audio puzzle:
This was kind of inspired by numbers stations, like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Here's the actual audio.
As I discovered during the event, that does not work on all browsers! Like a fool, I had only tested on Firefox, but apparently it doesn't work on Chrome (and maybe Safari?). But, by this point everyone was in the Discord server, so I was able to provide folks with hints. In the meantime, a few resourceful people were able to check the HTML source code and directly track down the .wav file location, which played fine when you open it directly.
Oh! Speaking of the source code, I'm pleased that people did poke into it, since I had a few more Easter eggs buried within.
If you haven't figured it out already, those audio numbers are the opening part of the Fibonacci sequence. For some reason this was in my head from an old Square One Mathnet episode. Thinking back on it, there was a LOT of PBS-type stuff in this hunt, from Carmen Sandiego geography to Square One math puzzles. Some people got it from Fibonacci, others directly calculated the sequence scheme, a couple needed help. A surprisingly large number of people didn't know what to do with the surprisingly large number that was the answer. The solution, of course, was to use it to unlock the combination padlock on their Mysterious Treasure Chest!
There were a whole bunch more trinkets inside, including:
One or more noisemaker.
One or more tightly-wrapped (albeit stale) brownie.
A set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle-branded party napkins.
A set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle temporary tattoos.
A pen.
A card reading "Shine a light on me!"
This shifting between analog and digital puzzles just tickled me so much. As I said later, it reminded me of the rhythms of my favorite shadowruns: you do legwork to gain access to the facility, then the decker jacks into the matrix to open some doors, then the team advances and finds a port on the secured network, then the decker takes over the facility, etc. The chaining together of physical space and cyberspace is one of my favorite things, both to experience and to create.
In this particular "run", guests had to figure out what the heck was going on. To jump ahead to the solution: the pen included a blacklight. Shining the blacklight onto the card revealed a hidden message written with invisible ink.
Not a particularly helpful message! This says "Other side!". Flipping the card over and shining the light reveals yet another message, "Look There", between some arrows. A few people were stumped by this step, which was guiding them back to the arrows way back on the first "Please Do Not Open Before Noon PDT" cards. Shining the light on that would reveal the final message: yet another URL to yet another website, guiding you back into cyberspace once again!
I'd decided pretty early on that I wanted to do something with invisible ink, and I particularly loved the idea of hiding a message in plain sight early on, and having guests return to it later with more information and resources to extract meaningful data. The padlock was an obvious example of that, the greeting card with invisible ink a much less obvious one. Actually getting the ink took quite some doing! I'd initially thought of using lemon juice and having people heat it, but, as it turns out, this doesn't work well at all. I then went down a rabbit hole of making my own invisible ink with a reagent. You can find a bunch of formulas online, most of them don't work or don't work well. I finally found one that was good: you make the ink by mixing together tap water and baking soda, draw the message in it, then make the reagent by combining rubbing alcohol with turmeric. The message fades into invisibility, and the reagent brings it out really nicely. I'd gotten pretty far along this distribution plan, going so far as buying cute little bottles to hold the reagent, before belatedly asking myself: "Is it really OK to send 100% isopropyl alcohol through the postal service?"
I did some research and determined that the answer was a hard nope. Well, more like a hard please don't. Highly concentrated alcohol is considered an explosive. You need to declare it, hand it off in person to a postal employee (not a comforting thought in COVID times!), and it cannot travel on airplanes, only ground transport, and thus wouldn't be eligible for Priority Mail and wouldn't arrive in time.
While looking up these various inks, I kept getting ads for invisible ink pens, which I just reflectively pooh-poohed and barrelled past. After my reagent dreams went up in smoke, though, I revisited it, and ended up deciding that was the way to go. You can get them for really cheap; they're sold out in many places but I found a seller on eBay who was nearby and offered fast delivery. As a nice bonus, the invisible ink pen let me write much more compactly than I would have been able to with homemade ink, which would need a paintbrush or similar wider applicator.
And, at the end of all this, my guests each got an invisible ink pen as a party favor, so that's pretty fun!
That final web site came up with an encouraging note progressing the fiction, and a final "puzzle" to solve, which was really my final content gate: asking people to enter information from various clues along the way. Again, this was just mild paranoia on my part. I'd configured robots.txt and noindex, nofollow and all sorts of stuff to make sure these sites wouldn't be crawled or show up in search results, and the odds of someone randomly typing in these characters during the few hours the content was live were infinitesimal, but out of an abundance of caution I wanted to make sure that only folks on Official Party Business would make it through to the end.
The very last page was a cornucopia, a joyful explosion of animated gifs of the TMNT. I think there were around 40 altogether, mostly drawn from the original 80s cartoon but some from later incarnations. It was all very silly and fun. You could click a button at the top of the page, which would play the theme to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time arcade game.
And at the bottom I had a sincere and heartfelt "thank you" to everyone for participating, along with a link to what everyone expected all along: a Zoom call! I actually sprang for one month of a Zoom membership to get this; again, it was cheaper than renting a place or something would have been, so I was able to justify some expense.
Continuing the theme of "overthinking everything", I was worried that the call would feel chaotic with more than a dozen people on at a time. I'd initially thought of having different "rooms" linked from that page, again emulating something like a traditional party feel: I would hang out in the "Kitchen" room, but you could also pop into the "Living room" or the "Balcony" or the "Front door" to see who else was there and have little side-conversations. But, it turns out that you need to purchase a separate Zoom subscription for every simultaneous call you want to have, and, uh, no thank you!
The first person to pop in was my youngest brother, who had endured a biblical flood which had destroyed his parcel, but showed resilience and pressed on through the digital realm into the Zoom call. It was just the two of us for a little while, and he was good-natured about my constant state of distraction as I monitored the Discord and my text messages to field technical inquiries with various levels of franticness.
The next person to pop in was Josh, who had been the first one into the Discord and thus won some sort of prize. Josh had received some help from his daughter, and it was really fun to see her.
And, to see kids in general. As more folks hopped in I enjoyed hearing about how different folks had responded to the situation, from the gleeful destruction of Young Ben to the grave concern of Silas ("Oh, no! Chris is missing!!").
The whole in-person (well, "in-person") thing ended up being really wonderful and lovely. My concerns about it feeling too crowded or chaotic faded away: there was a really great conversational flow, great mixing between people from different stages of my life who hadn't met before, and tons of good vibes. I realized after the fact that we'd had a conversation that lasted for nearly two hours without ever once talking about Donald Trump or COVID-19. I don't think I've matched that record before or since, and it was one of the many highlights of my birthday.
So, yeah! The whole project was really stupid and I never would have done it if I'd known how long it would take to prepare, but as the same time it's probably the most fun I've had all year and I'm delighted by how it turned out. I got lots of really great and kind messages after the event, too, and it felt really gratifying to hear that I'd provided a little bit of lightness into folks' lives. Even if it was a blacklight!
It was pretty fun, and I expect I will lose more games in the future.
Stellaris has been on my radar for a while. I've been longing for a big, meaty strategy game to dig into, but have been underwhelmed by the last few incarnations of Civilization, which has historically been my go-to. Even after picking up Civ VI for free on the Epic Games Store recently, I think I only played for like thirty minutes before getting bored and annoyed and haven't picked it back up again. Stellaris has a really great reputation, and I'd thoroughly enjoyed my previous experiences with Europa Universalis 3, so I was delighted to receive it as a gift from my ever-reliable brother and dig into it.
The learning curve for these games is brutal. The Stellaris tutorial is significantly better than the EU3 one, which was absolutely broken, but even so it's pretty overwhelming at first. There are dozens and dozens of menus and windows and orders to familiarize yourself with, and all systems are interconnected. I think I have it more or less all in my head now, but I'm also pretty sure that I had to shove out some childhood memories to make room for it.
Learning the game is also challenging because it has changed so much. That is one of the things Paradox has a great reputation for: like many midsized publishers, they are fantastic about continually updating their games for years and years, adding new features and improving the balance and fixing bugs. But that also means that existing information can become outdated. The details on the official wiki seem to be accurate, but in general Googling for questions I had wasn't very fruitful: many of the guides and stuff written for Stellaris came out soon after the game's launch, and the version of the game I'm playing now is quite different from that one. To pick one example at random, it seems like the entire way you expand your borders is different from before. It sounds like in earlier versions of the game, your borders would automatically push out over time based on your Pops and other factors. In the current version, though, you expand your territory by building an Outpost. How do you build an Output? By issuing the "Build Starbase" order. This will build an Outpost, which is NOT a Starbase. If you want a Starbase, you have to build a Starbase, then open your Starbase, then click the "Upgrade to Starbase" option to change your Starbase into a Starbase. A Starbase that isn't a Starbase doesn't count against your Starbase limit, while a Starbase that is a Starbase does count towards it. Obviously.
Stellaris, like the other Paradox games, is termed a Grand Strategy game. It has a lot of similarities to the Civ (or, in this case, Alpha Centauri) franchise as it goes beyond individual battles or even military conflict in general: you must juggle political, social, technological, and economic concerns. Often times you can "win" by, say, having a large military that you never need to deploy, successfully deterring potential rivals; or by carefully forging alliances to exert a sphere of soft-power influence. This does scratch a pretty powerful itch of mine, as I love games that you can win without needing to fight, or at least not have that be the sole focus.
One major difference between Civ games and Paradox games, though, is that the whole concept of "winning" is significantly more ephemeral in the latter. Civ has always had very well-defined victory conditions: conquer the entire world, or be the first civ to land on Alpha Centauri, or merge with the global consciousness, or whatever: you get a nice victory screen and a tidy end to your story. Paradox, though, arguably is creating simulations more than games. There isn't a dynamic where there's one winner and six losers; instead, there are, like, fifty different nation-states that are each trying to do their best. It ends up falling to the player to define for themself what they want to do. Simply surviving is a very worthy and challenging goal. (One that I've failed!) I'm very, very far from the endgame in Stellaris, but from what I can tell, it looks like the kind of default position is to have the highest score in the year that the game ends (2500, I believe?), which is very similar to how EU3 wound up.
In keeping with the simulation theme, Paradox games don't have immortal beings with absolute dictatorial sway over their nations from 4000 BC until 2100 AD. Instead, a wide variety of leaders will come, make an impact, age and then pass. In my particular game, I was playing as Earth, which starts the game with a Democratic government. My President had won office with a mandate to increase production of Alloys. She succeeded, but was voted out of office nonetheless. It's an interesting dynamic to have imperfect tools to work with; one of my Governors became Corrupt, and I needed to decide whether to keep him in place and accept the increase in Crime or whether to replace him with a less-experienced but more trustworthy replacement.
Much like Civ, I do really dig the early, exploration-heavy phase of the game. The way this plays out in Stellaris is really interesting. Your map is the galaxy, and you move between star systems, which are the nodes of the map. But not every node is directly connected to every other node. Instead, you basically end up with connected constellations, and can only move between particular systems. This raises all sorts of interesting strategic implications: certain systems may act as hubs, and be important because they link together many other systems; while some systems are chokepoints with only two connecting systems, and could be crucial to block enemies' movements.
The exploration phase reminded me a lot of my mega-game of EU3, where I gradually mapped the world from Mecklenburg. But in Stellaris I had a lot more explorers active. I think in EU3 I only had like two armies who traveled through the entirety of Africa, the Middle-East and Asia, while in my short game of Stellaris I built something like 12-15 Science vessels and they were all active. In both games exploration is really important to discover where potential rivals and allies live and what resources you might exploit. In EU3 I was very motivated by trying to discover new Centers of Trade so I could dominate them economically; in Stellaris I was hunting for Anomalies to research and candidates for new planets to settle.
I think I may switch up my exploration strategy in my next game. Unlike EU3, Stellaris differentiates between merely entering a territory and surveying it. A ship may go from A to B to C, which will reveal what planets are in each system and how they are connected. Or it may actually survey each system, which takes much more time but reveals how many resources the system holds, where they are located, and the location of any anomalies.
In my game, I surveyed every system as I came across it, which is pretty cool, but may not have been all that useful: I was sometimes surveying stars that were like 25 hops away from Earth, which I couldn't possibly have claimed no matter how cool they were. Anyways, I'm wondering now if it might be a better strategy to explore in two waves: send out some early ships that just go as fast and as deep as they can, so you can quickly discover your neighbors and the geometry of the galaxy; and then send a second, bigger wave to properly survey the previously-discovered systems. That way you could focus on strategically-important areas, too.
Anomalies turned out to be a really great way to inject some storytelling into the game. Big strategy games are usually very light on the in-game narrative, which does leave a lot of space for players to tell their own stories ("Gandhi is such a warmongering jerk!!"), but can also make the game feel sterile. One of the (many, many) things I love about Fall from Heaven 2 is how its Events and unique encounters provide color, texture, and narrative thrust to the world. In Stellaris, the overall 4X experience is typically abstract, but when you explore an anomaly it gets really specific and wonderful. They are short but vivid descriptions, enticing fragments of past civilizations, their follies or their triumphs or the blank mysteries they left behind. Or hints of science beyond our comprehension, or dimensions beyond our own. They're always surprising. The mechanical effects are usually rather simple but welcome: permanently adding resources to a nearby planet, say, or giving a sizable chunk of Society research. Every once in a while, you actually get to choose from a multi-choice dialog prompt: for example, upon discovering that the object you've been researching is the deceased remains of an extinct species, you can let the coffin continue on its journey, or take it for further studies. I'm always a big fan of choice in games, and it's a delight to have one here.
I think my growth pattern was basically fine in this game. I discovered Alpha Centauri early during the tutorial and established a colony there, which grew large enough to be independent after a couple of decades. Much later I belatedly surveyed Sirius and found another promising planet and had planted a colony there. Those two planets and Earth were the only highly-compatible worlds I came across, with everything else Desert planets or similar with only around 30% habitability. But even if I had found another planet I think I was near the limits of my Administrative Capacity (?) to manage them.
It took me a while to figure out how building works on planets: there's a nice big obvious button by available Building slots to bring up a window of all the new things you can construct, but I didn't realize until pretty late that you can also build Districts by clicking the much smaller grids off to the left. I think that in most cases the Districts are more cost-effective, so they're better options if you just need to make some more Jobs or Housing available for your Pops. I suspect that in longer-running games planets will tend to specialize, which would make Buildings more important to get multiplicative bonuses to your production.
Diplomatically, my game started out pretty fine. It took a while for me to make first contact, and the first aliens I met were pretty friendly xenophiles. We signed a lot of treaties and agreements. I didn't realize until later that these agreements inhibit your ability to expand into unclaimed territory, so I might be more cautious in the future about signing those.
I also encountered a couple of Fallen Empires. This is a cool mechanic that I don't think I've seen in other games. You, and most of the AI factions, are young up-and-comers at the start of the tech tree and just starting to expand from a single planet. The Fallen Empires, though, are ancient Prothean-style civilizations who have existed for millennia. They have large territories and advanced technology and sizable fleets; but they are stagnant and decadent, and do not grow or advance like the other AI factions do. So, early in the game they are overwhelmingly powerful and not to be trifled with, but beyond a certain point you (or other up-and-coming galactic civilizations) can take them on, conquer and loot their empires. I think that will be a really interesting dynamic.
I found a few other empires, finally encountering one that would be my doom. They were Spiritualist Xenophobes, religious bigots who wanted to wipe all heathen aliens out of existence. I had a bad feeling about them.
Looking at the map, I saw a way to potentially block their expansion. I began to to prioritize my Output construction in that direction: if I could reach the chokepoint before them, then I would have dozens and dozens of star systems on my side of the divide, which I could then explore, claim and settle at my leisure. But if they broke through, then it would be almost impossible to contain them, and I would need to maintain a border that would span a half-dozen systems.
I threw all of my Influence towards building a series of Outposts reaching towards that chokepoint. After some foolish early expansions, I'd come to realize that the best way to expand territory is system-by-system. Building an Outpost three systems away costs exactly as much Influence as building an Outpost in each of those three systems. At least in my game, Influence was the gating factor as I was swimming in Alloys and drowning in Minerals.
My prospective foes were expanding, but less single-mindedly than me, branching in some other directions besides the one I was worried about. I moved my Fleet down into the sector I intended to claim to keep a close eye on them, as my Construction Ships laid track all the way down.
And then, when I was just one hop away from the chokepoint, I saw something terrible: a foreign Construction Ship entering "my" system! The only conceivable reason to be here was to build. I was too late.
Or... was I?
I mulled things over. I didn't want a war, and wasn't really prepared for a war. But declaring a war would keep them from taking that system. And it would buy me some time. Maybe, if I could reinforce my position, and build that Output, then turn my Starbase into a Starbase and get some defenses into it, I could actually defend this position. Using EU3 as a baseline, I hoped that I could survive for a respectable length of time, then sue for a white peace, keeping my border intact.
On the other hand, my prospective opponents already hated me, with a -1000 attitude modifier. I didn't have any allies or mutual-defense treaties. I had never built a new combat ship during the entire game. I had never fought a war in Stellaris before and didn't know what it would entail.
But... it's just a game, eh? Why not go for it! So I did.
And, well, yeah. It was a fun game, and I lost.
But I had a blast! Overall, Stellaris feels like a blend of Europa Universalis 3 and Mass Effect 1, which is exactly what I wanted. There's the same joy of discovery, beautiful galaxy, fascinating aliens and inspiring technology that ME1 had, with the strategic depth and enormous timeline of EU3.
I feel like I know all the basics now. I'm sure there are more mechanics to come; I had just unlocked Sectors right before the game's end, never learned how to use wormholes, never unlocked any of the unique resources. I think I'll probably play at least more pacifistic Earth-focused game and hopefully get a bit further before branching out into some other governments and playstyles. I have a lot more to look forward to!
As alluded to in my previous post, I went on a bit of a YouTube bender in the midst of reading Capital and Ideology. This was actually a momentous occasion, as it is the first time in my approximately 14 years of using YouTube that the algorithm did something good. Usually it suggests inane, offensive or redundant content, so it was a pleasant surprise that, for the first time in my entire life, I was actually seeing YouTube recommendations pointing me towards unexpected things that turned out to be delightful.
This all started with the aforementioned short The New Spirit, also known as "Taxes to Beat the Axis". This is a really remarkable piece, filled with education, humor, drama and spectacle. The Sixteenth Amendment was only a few decades old, and the idea of a progressive income tax was relatively novel.
The first section is really funny, with Donald's swings from enthusiasm to sulking and back again. It's really interesting to see historical artifacts in there, like old-fashioned ink blotters. But the most stunning section is the final few minutes. We pull out from Donald's private domestic zaniness and witness his enthusiastic run across America, gaining a broad perspective of the entire continent: all bound together, united, with the mass communication of the radio tying California with the East Coast, seeing the unique beauty of the Rocky Mountains and the Texan desserts and the Louisiana delta. And that dissolves into the awe-inspiring and shocking militancy of the final minutes: we see the fruits of that great united nation, putting to work the wealth of the nation, her factories busy, churning out the weapons to defeat fascism. I think the part of this short that sticks with me the most is the way the narrator says "Guns, guns, all kinds of guns!", his quivering tone suggesting a mixture of reverence and titillation.
That's actually the second video I saw when searching "Taxes to Beat the Axis" on YouTube. The first one I saw is sort of a sequel, "The Spirit of 43". This is the one I vaguely remember seeing at the Ground Round in my childhood, along with a video I can't seem to find anywhere that updated Aesop's Fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper and ended with the Grasshopper relaxing to a luxurious winter thanks to his stash of War Bonds. Anyways, The Spirit of 43 strikes a markedly different tone in many ways from the earlier work. This is a more internal struggle, with Donald reaching within himself to do the right thing instead of responding to an authoritative voice.
I'm struck again and again by the sense of collective struggle in these shorts. The government is us, it's we the people putting our resources together - "Your taxes, my taxes, our taxes" - to accomplish something important. I really wish we could reclaim that sense of all being in this together.
Another interesting artifact is the cartoons of Tex Avery, including Blitz Wolf. This is less nuanced (who would have ever thought that Donald Duck would be the avatar of nuance?!), but crams in a ton of gags and is really fun to watch. Where Donald appeals to your mind, Avery appeals to your fighting spirit, with tons of slapstick and scenery-chewing. This is nominally a program to sell war bonds, but that appeal feels very perfunctory and tacked-on, not integrated into the story like the Donald shorts.
From here, I took a detour into a longer and more structured form of propaganda: Why We Fight. This amazing series of films from Frank Capra hold up impressively well today, both as history and as art.
So, just to state the obvious: Yes, this is propaganda. It was developed by the United States government to shape public perceptions of the war; more specifically, to convince a generally isolationist populace of the need to fight in Europe and Asia, and to convince conscripted young men that this cause was worth killing and dying for.
That said, it comes off as surprisingly nuanced propaganda. I was kind of impressed at how deeply it delved into the history of the rise of Hitler in Germany: it covers the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the punishing payments extracted from Germany, the hyperinflation this led to, and the human misery and desperation accompanying it. The narrator's overall message is along the lines of "The Germans were going through hard times, and they made the mistake of believing that the Nazis had the answers. Of course, we all have gone through hard times. In America we worked through our problems democratically, establishing the New Deal and fixing our economy while continuing to live freely." It carefully threads a needle, the same one Piketty delicately traces, of explaining how the prior actions of the Allies laid the groundwork for Hitler's rise to power, while remaining very clear that his actions were inexcusable.
The big overriding proposition of this series is that World War II is a cataclysmic battle between two incompatible worlds, the Free World of the allies and the Slave World of the axis. The Free World is implicitly denoted by FDR's famous Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. The Axis only promises freedom from want and tramples on all the others. I was struck by how the films stressed America's diversity, making a note that Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Christians and everyone else shares equal rights to practice their faith. It also is (to my ears) surprisingly friendly towards the left, repeatedly decrying how Hitler and Mussolini suppressed socialist movements in Europe and praising the freedoms granted to labor unions in the US.
As history it works well and thoroughly, not starting with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the invasion of Poland in 1939, but the invasion of Manchuria in 1931. We see how long aggression had gone unchecked, how many times belligerent nations broke treaties without repercussions, how often the League of Nations tutted their tongues and did nothing. Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 follows the same vein. The narrator spells it out very clearly and darkly: The people in the United States asked, Why should we care that some Africans in huts have been attacked, or some Asians in rice paddies? The message is clear: we should have cared, we had a moral duty to care, and we're only in this mess now because we neglected to act when the victims were people who didn't look or speak like us.
That narrator is a constant companion through the series. It's fascinating and instructive to compare this to The Triumph of the Will. From what I understand, Capra intended this series to be a sort of response to or antidote for that famous Nazi propaganda movie. They are completely different beasts, though. Triumph of the Will has almost no dialogue, just sweeping and inspiring imagery of crowds and movement, mass roaring chants; there are selections from speeches by Nazi leaders, but the real power is the response to those words, not the words themselves. It's a film designed to overwhelm your senses, to inspire awe.
So, it's interesting that Why We Fight is such a dialogue-heavy series. We're getting a history lesson, and following troop movements on a map, and hearing glosses on major events. It cajoles, it pontificates, it debates, it states. It's doing a lot, but what it's trying to feel most like is an appeal to reason: it lays out evidence, makes arguments, and asks you to accept its conclusions.
The more I think about this, the more perfect this comparison is. When you're producing propaganda in the service of democracy, you're emulating democracy, and making each viewer its own citizen, capable of making up his or her own mind, and hoping we all pull together in the right direction in the end. When making propaganda in service of fascism, though, it's all about the mass movement, about unity, about unquestioning devotion and obedience. One picks you up, the other sweeps you away.
The nature of those arguments is also very well done. The movies frequently quote from Mein Kampf and various speeches from leaders in all three Axis nations, using their own words to illustrate the danger these countries pose. Sometimes it is highlighting the grandiose ambitions and despicable philosophy they hold. Other times it is to highlight their hypocrisy and treachery; one very effective example comes in part two, The Nazis Strike, replaying a speech from Hitler where he makes specific promises against any claim of territory on each of his European neighbors. The film returns to that speech again and again after each new border is breached, replaying his earlier words as an ironic counterpart to his later actions. It's making a clear argument that diplomacy with such a man is impossible. It also is stunningly similar to the technique recently popularized by Jon Stewart and now deployed by a variety of news-oriented comedians, highlighting the hypocrisy of politicians by playing old footage of them stating one thing alongside new footage of them saying or doing the opposite.
The series isn't perfectly high-minded, of course. While the movies rightfully decry the Nazi philosophy of Aryan supremacy, they're completely silent on America's own history of racial injustice, making no mention of the Jim Crow South or the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese Americans. It generally avoids racial and national characterizations, but does slip in a couple of suggestions that, say, the Germans have a history of aggression (while also going out of its way to show that America has been a good home for Germans, highlighting the many ethnic Germans serving in high ranks of American government and military).
Finally, I wanted to note that the editing of these films is really remarkable. It's surprisingly fast and kinetic, with the kind of rapid cuts and disorienting shifts in action that I tend to associate with 21st-century Hollywood movies. The aerial combat scenes as in The Battle of Britain are particularly effective, exhilarating and tense.
It's really interesting to see the shift between high-level and low-level information. Some of the US War Department's films were aimed to educate (or "educate") the populace about the broad contours of the war: why we were fighting, the theaters in which we were operating, what territory had been lost or reclaimed. Others were much more low-level: what you, the viewer, ought to be doing (or not doing). Those Donald Duck cartoons above are a great example of this: you should be paying your taxes to support the war effort. There was similar propaganda around discreet communications ("Loose Lips Sink Ships"), self-sufficiency (Victory Gardens), and volunteering for military or non-military duty.
A particularly fascinating sub-genre were films aimed directly at servicemembers. With a drafted, non-professional military that consisted mostly of young single men, there was a... very particular tone used to impart important lessons. Lewd and funny, it's kind of shocking that these were actual government films, but I can see why they might be more effective than a straight training movie.
I'm mostly thinking of Private Snafu here. The pedigree of these cartoons is kind of insane: Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) wrote the scripts, Chuck Jones animated them, and Mel Blanc voiced them. Unlike Why We Fight, these were not distributed for broader public consumption, and were exclusively viewed by members of the armed forces.
I think the humor still holds up well, with the unfortunate and major exception of the blatant racism. Unlike the Disney cartoons, which used anthropomorphized animals and vehicles to depict our foes, or Why We Fight, which uses actual footage of foreign leaders and soldiers, the Snafu cartoons include painful racial characterizations, particularly of the Japanese, in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has viewed, say, Buck Rogers comics of the era. It is tempting to contextualize this and point out that we were at war with the Japanese, but you can't escape the major differences between how our European adversaries were depicted compared to our Asian adversaries.
Maybe the biggest impact all of these historical and artistic artifacts have on me is a new appreciation for the massive difference between the pre-1970s civilian army versus our modern professional army. Don't get me wrong, I am extremely glad that we no longer have a draft! But when I look back at history, it's striking how there was such a unified sense of purpose in our conflicts: everyone was serving in the war or directly affected by it; even when opposing war, as in Vietnam, it was a national issue that impacted everyone. Today, it seems like our wars are parceled out and self-contained, with citizens duly funding the expenses via our taxes but having no sense that it is "our" fight, "our" purpose. That seems to me like a dangerous trend. Whether a war is just or not, it is being fought on our behalf even if not by our personal bodies, and I kind of wish we paid the same degree of attention to our missions in Afghanistan that we once did to our missions on Pacific atolls or European beaches.
