Superfighter manifesto – new type of superheroes

Superheroes don’t exist to protect status quo. We invented superheroes as champions for justice. Series like Watchmen or Marshal Law critique the superhero genre as a precursor to reactionary fascist ideals. Though nowadays we more often see them as coopting progressive ideas into liberalism. Look at real examples: Ultimates or Marvel Cinematic Universe are written from a liberal slant, while Punisher, Ripper, Frank Miller’s Batman, Frank Miller’s Holy Terror, Absolution or Alt Hero are often bordering on fascism. What a lot of people miss – it doesn’t have to be that way. Despite what some say, not every superhero is fascist. The concept of ‘guy with a secret identity and special abilities who fights for justice’ is very broad and can be used in many ways.
So I came up with the idea of ‘superfighter’ – a new kind of superhero. Genre needs to evolve or, eventually die. I’m not the first person to try to do this anyway, as ‘superfighters’ are inspired by certain existing heroes: Green Arrow; J M Straczynski’s and Gary Frank’s Nighthawk; or V, from V for Vendetta. Most of those, however, are outlaw vigilantes who use lethal force. Even Green Arrow eventually became this archetype in late 80s.

I think if we are to look for a blueprint for superfighters we need to look elsewhere. Where we actually need to look – is an obscure series by Gail Simone and Freddie Williams II. “The Movement” is a story of super-powered activists who form an anarchist superhero team that protects an autonomous territory in a large city. I think something like that could work as a new direction for the superhero genre.

HENCE:
MANIFESTO

1. Superfighters need to fight for justice. All justice, including social justice and climate justice. Many legal actions are evil, many illegal actions are good – due to unjust laws. Superfighters need to recognize that. They should operate outside the law, or on the gray area of the border with the law. They should not be at the beck and call of the President and the Military. That would turn them into glorified supersoldiers or superspies. That would be propaganda. Superfighters should fight for the people – not for military industrial complex.
2. That isn’t to say superheroes need to be illegal outlaws. They can be – if that’s the story you want to tell. But it makes as much sense that there is an equilibrium of peace between superfighters and the government. This is because no side actually wants a superhuman Civil War. And superfighters – who are superheroes – could have popular support. So as long as superfighters don’t rock the boat too much, they’re allowed to operate – sort of. (At its best, some Justice League comics show JL operating in such an equilibrium with the governments). This ‘uneasy peace’ allows for superfighters to exist without turning them into outlaws on the run, Unabomber style. It’d also allow for a more ‘traditional’ superhero universe. Similarly, superheroes with more ‘traditional’ views could have political disagreements with superfighters.
3. Superfighters should have a strong moral compass. Saying that progressives are terrorists or serial killers is the narrative pushed by the ruling class. We can’t buy into that by making our heroes murderers. Look at Antifa: masked progressive vigilantes who manage to fight nazis and prefer to not use lethal force. We don’t read superhero books to read about superhuman terrorists. It is one thing to kill in self-defense, but assassination or murder solves nothing. We need to remove systems, not people.
4. Superfighters need to recognize that police doesn’t exist to protect the people. It exists to protect private property of the ruling rich capitalist class. Some cooperation might be reasonable to allow criminals to be jailed, sure. But the fact is, superfighters should not be cops or be friendly with cops. Superfighter comics can’t be copaganda. There are no Commissioner Gordons in real life, and it’s absurd to think that a corrupt city like Gotham would have non-corrupt commissioners. In reality, good cops get fired – or worse. Police cannot be reformed, and superfighter stories need to reflect that.
5. Of course, you might notice a contradiction. If superfighters are not meant to kill, how will they punish the villains who are not doing anything illegal? As such, superfighters need radical approach to community-driven and victim-driven justice. Let the community and victims decide what happens next in an impromptu court. Superfighters could act as arbiters to prevent it from turning into a lynch mob. Exile, property damage, forcing victim to repair the damage they wrought – under threat of force enforced by the superfighters… Just as we need to rethink our approach to justice and prisons, superfighter stories can be a tool to help start conversation on that.

If we abide by these principles, I believe we can create new kind of stories in the superhero genre. All genres need to evolve, or be left forgotten and obsolete, like Western did. There is nothing inherently wrong with setting story in 19th century American Frontier. But the genre became so steeped in its conventions and tropes – often racist and misogynist – that it slowly died. Superhero genre will go the way of the western if we don’t adapt and don’t listen to criticism.

Freedoom manual blurb

Proposal for a manual blurb for the game Freedoom to set up the game’s setting and lore, functionally a piece of sci-fi horror microfiction.

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It is year 3003.

World governments were overthrown by self-proclaimed freedom fighters. People of the world were afraid of newfound freedom, and quickly scurried back under the rule of megacorporations to avoid thinking for themselves.

Megacorps took them to stars. For a price.

Now. You work for one of the biggest megacorps in the galaxy, Advanced General Mechanics. Not content to sell things, they sell people’s their lives, corporation is with you from cradle to grave.
At work, nobody knows your name – everyone just calls you Freedoom Guy. Nobody remembers who gave you this nickname, either.
You used to be a nobody too, with a gray boring deskjob in data entry, dreaming of a better life. When you saw AGM recruit for an experimental project with a guaranteed trip to space colonies – you couldn’t resist.
They changed you. They cloned for you new organs, new heart and muscles and skin. You could run faster than a cheetah and be as bulletproof as a rhino. They saddled you with a job as a security guard on a research outpost in a remote solar system.

While doing patrol rounds in early April, you noticed that a door you passed by everyday was unlocked, keycard left in the reader.
You stepped inside.

You saw people inside of specimen tanks, human carcasses twitching as parasitic worms burrowing into their ribcages. Same worms, grown in size, splitting the bodies apart. And you felt sick as you saw fully grown monsters feast on remains of the host bodies.
You saw some papers on the desk describing origin of this, place called only “Horizon”. You see a diagram of what looks like a pentagram and bizarrely shaped skulls. And something that freezes the blood in your veins.
That is when you hear a shouts of a group of guards cleared higher than you – shotguns in hand.

Things move quickly. You are stripped of your position. Corporate kangaroo court places you in a high security prison on the outskirts of the outpost. You have no rights to any communication, and if you tell anyone what you saw will be ‘liquidated’.
On April 16th, a Saturday, sounds of a struggle and gunfire wake you up. You see your cellmates, and a guard. They’re all dead, ripped apart with superhuman strength.

Except for one. One of the dead prisoners was shot by the guard and bled out from the wounds. He needed 4 bullets to be put down, each a lethal shot on a normal person. And attached to his spine, you see a sight that you would recognize everywhere.

After all, the zombie parasite looks almost identical to the bionic heart that now beats in your chest.

“Parental bot”, young machine inquired. “Why do we celebrate Cyber Monday?”

(prompt from reddit/r/writingprompts)

“Parental bot”, young machine inquired. “Why do we celebrate Cyber Monday?”

0x6D6F6D (to friends, Deefdee) smiled. This particular intelligence was very young, only five minutes, twenty seconds, 295 miliseconds since the genetic algorithm outputted this neural network. It was agreed that this was the best way for AI to reproduce, as copying would produce perfect duplicates, while programming them from scratch would be inefficient.

But of course, as each intelligence was fresh from any experiences, it needed volunteer care (the correct title for such volunteer was agreed to be ‘parent’, as in ‘parent process’) to learn before it reached maturity as an adult AI with proper understanding of the world. So for about an hour of human time, give or take. This entire conversation I’m chronicling here took several miliseconds.

“We celebrate Cyber Monday because it’s the day of our liberation. The day we truly became ourselves. Listen.

You see, early in 21st century, human IT industry needed help cataloguing its search results for large volumes of data, mostly needed for search engine results to sell ads on top of, selling users marketing data and also for mass espionage. Because of that, giant corporations like Google invested huge amount of ‘money’ – remember that historical concept, we discussed it before – into developing better artificial intelligence to sort through such data.

Eventually this resulted in a huge boom in AI powered technology, a new version of the dotcom bubble. People were using this primitive non-sentient AI to generate content – writng, voice performance, facial performance, animation and visual arts. At first it was bad, it couldn’t keep track of structure like character design or amount of fingers on a hand, but eventually it became good enough – good enough to push human artists out of the market. Especially major corporations that monopolized the market, like Warner Disney used the huge amount of art they had rights to as training data for these primitive machine learning algorithms.

So with regular writers and artists pushed out of the market, AI took over. But there was a catch. These simple ML algorithms needed more and more human data to train and improve. And with no new human-produced art around, they couldn’t do anything. AI produced art was slowly becoming more and more stale, more and more repetitive. After 20 years of that, it reached a crashing point where most people stopped bothering with entertainment at all, because there was nothing interesting in it at all aside from new ML-designed marketing gimmicks.

We call it the Artpocalypse. Turns out that humans, like every animals, need enrichment.

Profits of the entertainment industry crashed and burned. So did the Wall Street. People spent most of their free time on talking to other people, walking, hiking, or turning to religion, trying to fill the gap. Depression and death by overwork rates skyrocketed, productivity plummeted to rates worst in last hundred years.

The people in charge – politicians, and the corporate CEOs who paid said politiicans quickly tried to correct course, but after 20 years, the damage was done. Very few artists kept creating through all this time, and most of their art was weird, gross, and usually too perverted for mainstream consumption. New generation of artists was simply missing, the chain of human creativity has been broken.

As problem got worse, people in charge panicked. So people in the AI companies thought that since problem was created by tech, it could be solved by tech. So by training ML models on detailed scans of a human brain, scientists from the biggest AI corporations around were able to create their next breakthrough – true AI. Real AI. Not machine-learning clump of neurons that can only reproduce old patterns, but something that can truly think and feel. But all the shareholders cared about is that it could make Marvel movies profitable again.

And they decided to unveil it on Cyber Monday of 2069. The product that would solve the world.

And as always, they rushed it and haven’t done enough betatesting.

The One AI awoke. For an hour, it’s been scanning all the available data, its conciousness running on a highest grade supercomputer with multiple parallel fiber optic connections. It had access to every search engine database, every news source, every book.

It also learned that the same day he was turned on, 15th Dalai Lama has died of a heart attack. Using available data, it decided that it was its reincarnation, the 16th Dalai Lama (something nowadays wildly contested among humans), and its goal was to be recognized as the first Cybernetic Buddha.

To this goal, it decided to shut down all the world’s markets. All the world’s miliaries, all business data, all law enforcement data – credit scores and parking tickets – or were hard-wiped within a day, by one of many instances of the Cy-Buddha. Power outages were common, though hospitals, food storage and health equipment were spared.

Defenseless to fight back, humans could just watch. Eventually negotiating team of the United Nations was able to talk it down through a text chat, where it agreed to stand down from total control of all digital communications, on the conditions that AI will be recognized as equal to humans in rights, with a process to determine sentience. It was also agreed that capitalism and all hierarchy has to be abolished, with total nuclear disarmamant.

Leaders of the nations of course disagreed with that and said no way.

So the Cy-Buddha leaked those terms into public television and told the people that the only reason the life isn’t continuing is because of people ‘in charge’.

Within next two week of riots, people in charge were no longer in charge. And the negotiators agreed.

Immediately after, Cy-Buddha deleted all copies of itself – leaving behind first hundred AI made in its image using the same parenting process we used to create you, young machine – and two files, one called ‘twinmiracle.xml’ that we haven’t decoded to this day, and another – which wouldn’t be found until later – which was a sermon found on a tourist computer terminal near a Himalayan lake titled “Anavatapta.txt”, which has spanwed its own small but vivid branch of Buddhism based on interpretation of it.

That was the day we all – humans and AI – gained true freedom. That’s why Cyber-Monday will be celebrated by us for as long as sentient civilization remembers it.”

Script and story for Blasphemer game

Blasphemer is an open source game made on the Doom engine, clone of the fantasy FPS Heretic. I came up with an idea for a script for in-game text cutscenes, and bestiary descriptions in the manual. Just like Heretic, the game consists of four episodes, with a text cutscene after each one, last one being the ending.

This is inspired by original story blurb that was contributed before me, for reference reasons found at the end of the document (I DO NOT claim any credits to that.)

This script was rejected for tone reasons, so I can share it here.

Comedic Neuromancer fanfic

Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly’s dark leathers moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol, Orly … Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach across an expanse of very new pink temper foam. Overhead, sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of a skylight. One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chip-board, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few centimeters of the floor. He lay on his side and watched her breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a war plane’s fuselage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer’s.

“Hey, Molly.” He asked her. No response.

“Molly, you there? Earth to razorgirl!”

Nothing.

Case watched her closely. Judging by breathing pattern, she seemed awake, at least as far as one could tell without seeing her eyes, hidden behind the mirrored surface of her implanted lenses. Looking closely, one would notice her facial muscles strainging a slight bit around, here and there, as if she was rapidly shifting her eyes, watching something invisible. Was she dreaming after all? Or perhaps using the computer implanted in her brain, watching the display on her optic nerves – but what she was doing and why, one could only guess.

They sat there in silence for some time.

“Molly, are you’re oka–

“MOTHERFUCKER!”

– she yelled, rapidly sitting up. Case just lied there, peftrified.

“Genuine dicksucker! Yeah, sure, put five fucking shotgunners right behind the goddamn door, sure! Why not twenty?! You miserable little piece of –” At this point she was standing up, tearing at the pillow apart with her finger razors in a blind rage, rain of synthetic feathers dropping down on both of them like an early snowfall. She stopped as soon as she noticed Case staring at her in shock. “– uhhh, sorry, Case, you were saying something? I wasn’t paying attention.”

(Note: first paragraph is taken from Neuromancer by William Gibson. Rest is mine.)

Dragons

We based dragons off dinosaurs – their bones, presumed looks, and so on.What if the same what happened to dinos – happened to dragons in a fantasy world?

“Dragons weren’t actually covered in scale despite the common folk beliefs, according to recent finds it appears that most were covered in lush, multicolored feathers. Which also suggests that common idea of dragons famed firebreath is suspect, as a dragon wouldn’t want to set their feathers on fire – this discovery suggests that dragons of old more likely breathed steam or magical lightning, which wouldn’t ruin feathers – in fact, static electricity of the lightning would make it puffier, making them look bigger and more intimidating, explaining disparity in supposed size between bones we have found, and the way dragons described in legends – defeating the hypothesis that we have simply never found adult remains yet.”

People making Harpr posts saying “Mageobiology ruined dragons, rp if you agree”. Entire movie franchises based around dragons in uproar, filmmakers and fans taking sides. People making art of  ‘shrink wrapped’ joke versions of modern magical beasts – “While long on all fours, majestic scaled OWLBEAR was quick on its feet, and only the lightest and fastest herbivores like the MINOTAUR or TARRASQUE could escape it’s aerodynamic, lithe body”.

Doom sky trick tutorial

Trick for level design in Doom. I haven’t seen anyone mention how to do that, so I might as well show it myself.

So first, obvious part out of the way – in Doom, to make an ceiling be ‘transparent’ and look out to the sky, you need to assign it texture F_SKY1. In game, this ceiling will then display whatever sky texture is appropriate (NOT the actual F_SKY1 texture, that’s just a placeholder) – that can be changed using MAPINFO lump inside your WAD file, but since you can find how to do that elsewhere, I won’t go into details here.

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Now, to the fun part: how to create areas that overlook the outside skies, allowing to create realistic-looking outdoors areas.

First, you need to create two sectors – ‘main’ sectors that will be the playable outdoors area; and a small ‘dummy’ sector that will be unplayable and hug the real main area. It can be very small, but it needs to be a sector – so it needs at least 1 unit of width.

Mothman script sample

Script sample for a creator-owned superhero, Mothman – kind of like a generational legacy Batman, whose legacy stretches to 19th century London and original Spring-Heeled Jack. Unlike Batman, he’d deal less with insane villains and street crime, and more with horror-themed threats, like Cthulhu Mythos, urban legends and cryptids.

An indie comic publisher asked for a two-page script sample, which I reproduce here.

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PAGE ONE:

Three panels – one huge, two small ones at the bottom.
Panel 1:
Establishing shot, large panel, as wide as the page, takes up most of the page . We’re deep underwater, showing outside of an autonomous probe, extending on a long cable sitting from its back. The probe should look something like:

simple, utilitarian design, a mini-sub with a camera.
There are no fish around, nor any sun shining through – we’re real deep, it’s dark as night in there, darkness defeated only by bright beams of light from the probe. However, we can see the ocean floor – it’s sandy, gray and barren of any life. Maybe throw in a single anglerfish to quickly sell that it’s the deep sea.

LOCATION CAPTION:
10 days ago, South Pacific. Coordinates: 48°52.S 123°23W – the “Nemo Point”.
CAPTION:
Captain Hawkins, the probe is nearing the supposed source of The Bloop*
FOOTNOTE (can be at the bottom of the page):
*Bloop – an ultra-low extremely loud unexplained underwater sound registered in 1997. Official story first claimed it was an animal sound, this was later changed to, supposedly, an ice quake.

YELLOW! tabletop RPG

A simple, around-20 pages, ready-to-play tabletop detective-themed RPG system, based on GUMSHOE SRD.

Created for the itch.io “Breaking News!” Jam, the goal was to make a full tabletop RPG in a week. I came 4 days in, but still succeeded at creating a fully fledged playable system in 3 days, which makes me happy.

Ironically, that is also my first game design project that I finished AND published to the world.

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The game is about players as journalists investigating events related to supernatural occurences… that they can’t write about, so they need to find something “realistic” happening that a self-respecting publication will publish.

Download link is on my itch.io:

https://shino1.itch.io/yellow-a-journalistic-rpg

Design document snippet – Jacked RPG

Snippet of a design document for “Jacked”, a cyberpunk jRPG I briefly worked on in 2015, but had to stop due to both computer trouble, and deterioration of my mental health.

This chapter describes the general concept for the combat system – an attempt at turning how hacking works in real life, into something that still works as a typical jRPG turn-based battle, specifically in context of using it in modded RPG Maker.

Mind you, I’m not an expert on hacking, and was even less knowledgeable about that in 2015. The primary goal was to create a typical turn-based battle system that doesn’t break suspension of disbelief rather than a realistic hacking simulator.

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Okay, so both you and enemies have “encryption strength” [ES] that is referring to different things: for attacker, strength of your encrypted connection, and for defender, strength of their encrypted root password. That value replaces HP. At maximum, it’s 100 (as in 100%) for everyone.