Freckles & Doubt

Last night, having after several weeks of play flogged my way through the entirety of Dragon Age: The Veilguard (the new Bioware game), I arrived at the climactic battle in my characteristic gameplay state: having duly and grimly maxed out all my companions' levels, completed all their individual angst-ridden storylines, refined my and their equipment to the highest quality, secured my romance of choice, massaged my allies to the greatest possible functionality, scoured every local map for quest markers, and knocked off every quest listing in my journal. Then I clicked on the fateful doorway to enter the final confrontation, and the game crashed to desktop. At which point I thought "Thank fuck!" and went to bed in a state of relief that the cosmic wossnames were, for once, looking out for me and, probably, my blood pressure.

What I am saying is, having finished the damned thing this morning in a state of fulminating irritation, I am now going to launch into a full-fledged rant on how much this game annoyed me from the vantage point of someone who both dropped a bucketload of money to upgrade my computer to run it, and has damned well played it to the hilt, if only more or less out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

I am a Bioware fangirl. I have played all the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games multiple times, some of them over and over and over again (probably nearly twenty run-throughs of Inquisition). I love their worldbuilding, their ethos of character interaction, their ability to present difficult choices and actual consequences, their humour and pathos and even their gosh-darned political sweep, this last being something I usually hate in my fluffy down-time pursuits. The last few weeks have consequently been marked by rising anger, betrayal and grief as I realised, incrementally, just how far the makers of Veilguard have departed from the previous games in the series: not just in the sense of ignoring or contradicting huge swathes of backstory and event and history and build-up, but in their clearly shifted goalposts, their determination to make, at base, simply a different kind of game.

How different? let me count the ways in which it has repeatedly made me swear, rage, cry or succumb to ennui.

• I get that setting it in Tevinter is necessarily a shift to an area we haven't seen before other than by implication, but Veilguard simply abandons or ignores too much history from the previous games. The mage rebellion has dropped off the map entirely, which, fair, Tevinter didn't experience it, but given the carry-through of the Inquisitor and Varric and Harding, too many previous decisions and characters are simply not referenced. Hawke and the possible stuck-in-the-Fade outcome? The Hero of Ferelden's search for a blight cure? various romances - Solas/Inquisitor (particularly!), Dorian/Bull? I know that that's a lot of possible ramifications given different player choices in different games, but they managed the world-state specifications and brief acknowledgements in DAI, why can't they here? What about Tevinter and slavery and Fenris's whole crusade? we don't even see slaves. And blight contact used to be a death sentence, see: whole basis for the DAO warden thing, and now it's not an issue? Despite relying on player investment in previous games as a marketing tool, they have surgically detatched Veilguard from a lot of what's gone before, and it feels like a severed limb.
  
• Veilguard gameplay presents a huge loss of what I can only call interactive texture, a sort of cut-price flattening of environments and radical slimming of NPC interactions. Compared to Skyhold, the Lighthouse feels bland and rather cold; there is a lack of connection to supporting allies who are dispersed to different allied bases rather than existing in a community. It feels like a related problem that quests are often tickboxes, in which motivations are often insubstantial and outcomes perfunctory. High-stakes choices feel unearned, decisions made for companions are unscaffolded and based on insufficient information. Too often it feels as though the game is paying lip service to agency. Losing or blighting a companion based on an arbitrary choice is maddening, I strenuously object to being blindsided by losses I have no way of predicting or avoiding. I play games to feel instrumental, not helpless.
  
• The overall feel of the game tends to a deliberate darkness and nastiness, environments and events have a relentless emphasis on grimness and destruction - not just metaphorically, actually, too often the visuals are too damned dark to see properly. The blight in particular is disgusting and depressing. If I wanted to wade through squelching tentacles and pulsating boils I'd play a horror game.
  
• The escalation of stakes was ridiculous - not just another Blight, but gods? TWO gods? Multiple blighted dragons? multiple Archdemons? they trashed the world. It was all so over-the-top I couldn't really get invested in the actually interesting reveals in lore and history and what have you.
  
• I realise these have never been open-world games, but previous iterations did not lead one around by the nose quite as egregiously. Inquisition managed a wonderfully open-world feel, the rollback on that is heartbreaking. Too much of Veilguard felt like blindly following the little diamonds towards the next quest objective, through often confusing landscapes that were painted backdrops rather than a real world.
  
• if I wanted to play timed or dexterity challenges (which I do not at all in any way) I would play a fucking console game. If I wanted to repeatedly solve stupid blight-node puzzles I would play stupid puzzle games. The puzzles are not intelligent and are often not properly scaffolded. I have never resorted to walkthroughs so often in my life, mostly because I simply didn't care enough to work it out for myself.
  
• If I wanted to micromanage tactical combos I would fucking look for that kind of game. Skill improvement felt arbitrary and opaque, trees were too complicated and new bonuses felt meaningless, combos were too fiddly to bother with, I ended up leaving companions to do their own thing. Playing on the lowest difficulty meant that button-mashing was actually fine as a strategy, but I do not like feeling that significant development time went into combat refinements I don't care about, at the cost of character and narrative interactions I do actually care about.
  
• I do actually want to micromanage equipment bonuses, I do not want to acquire random arbitrary gear with constellated bonuses I cannot optimise for myself. Nor to I wish to accumulate huge quantities of gear I cannot sell, or remove from my inventory, or give to my companions. Or even look through easily, they could have given us a damned sort function so I wasn't wading through irrelevant armour types every time I picked up something new and tried to work out if it was worth swapping.
  
• I actually loved the companion personalities and stories, but too often your own choice of response wasn't actually meaningful - in fact, a lot of the time I felt that choices on the conversation wheel were making no damned difference to anything. I can only speak personally to the Lucanis romance, which was deeply unsatisfying because it basically dropped off the map as soon as you'd made the conversation choice which was explicitly supposed to trigger it. It felt tick-box and unsubstantial, with too huge a gap between "you're in a romance!" and any actual narrative payoff. There was no supporting background detail, banter, romance interactions; hell, Fallout 4 did a better job of making a romance feel organic and scaffolded, and that's an FPS.
  
• Overall the writing actually wasn't brilliant, interactions often felt immature. Egregious example: Taash's nonbinary story was great, except it wholesalely dumped the idiom and structure of contemporary gender identity - in fact, of an extremely recent, narrow and specific idea of gender identity - on top of a fantasy setting, and made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to integrate it into any of the Thedas cultures, either linguistically or conceptually. I loved that they included it so respectfully, but the implementation in a weird way felt particularly young - it needed a more objective perspective and more nuanced consideration of the cultural implications in the Thedas setting.
  
  This game gave me the same feeling that recent Marvel superhero films have done: that I have just bought into a marketing exercise whose point is to maximise sales to the broadest possible demographic, one which is defined, in sharp contradistinction to previous efforts in the genre, as being significantly composed of people who do not share my tastes or interests. This has resulted, primarily, in a glossy, high-production-value product focused on action and combat, onto which gestures at narrative, world-building, fidelity to previous products, and any other loci of consumer investment, have been pasted as superficially as possible. If we're talking gods, this is not the thing itself, this is a meat-puppet avatar waved on the end of a tentacle, an extrusion prettily shaped, but glassy-eyed and vacant. When I play Dragon Age, I want to play Dragon Age, goddammit, not this ersatz, lobotomised thing.

Gods, but this epidemic thing is weirding to the mental health. I have spent two weeks quite happily noodling around at home, surviving interminable Zoom and Teams meetings (Tracy, I completely agree that Teams is horrible, it's severely clunky and the sound quality is awful), and tempering the faculty's disfunctional flailing by cuddling kitties and prodding my garden and reading fanfic and rediscovering my piano. Then this morning the milk in my tea tasted funny, which is fair given it's five days after its sell-by, so I sallied forth to do a grocery shop.

And that was fine, keeping distance and disinfecting hands a lot, and filling up my trolley with the wherewithal for another two weeks, and then I came to the till, and the nice lady behind her plastic screen apologetically informed me that I couldn't buy the three kinds of plant food in my basket, it was considered non-essential. And I lost it. I managed to tamp down the response to the poor woman, it clearly wasn't her fault, but I loaded the car and drove home in completely irrational tears, shaking and furious.

And that's a weirdly complicated response to a very minor thing in all this. It's clearly demonstrating how close we all are to the edge, how stressful this is, how thin is the veneer of functionality, but I also think it's pushing two very specific buttons for me in particular. One: I have a pathological need to trust the systems I am a part of, and I've generally been OK with how this country is handling things, and feeling to some extent held and protected by the precautions, but this is a completely irrational exclusion, why the hell will they let you buy seeds and bulbs but not the food to feed them? so my faith in the logic and integrity of the system took a knock. And, two: the only thing I can bloody well control in all this is my homespace. I can feed my kitties and sweep my floors and wash my linen and water my considerable container garden and feed it every two weeks, which is starting to really make a difference to its levels of green. And now I can't. I can't control my space, and I can't properly nurture the things which depend on me, and aargh apocalypse it's all falling apart.

So it was a brief storm of disproportionate woe, and was materially assuaged by (a) driving home the very long way round to charge up the car battery a bit, and playing loud Manic Street Preachers at speed on the freeway, and (b) the fortuitous memory that the above grocery expedition had enabled me to take shameless advantage of the supermarket's post-Easter array of discounted Lindt chocolate bunnies. So I'm fine now. But will have to feed leftover orchid food to my non-orchid potplants until lockdown lifts or I can find an evil quisling supermarket which isn't keeping such strict tabs on its product categories. And am making mental notes to be kind to myself, because thin veneer of calm. The chocolate is helping.

Last night, having finally figured out how to reconfigure the home theatre system from Zelda to Blu-Ray, I watched Avengers: Infinity War. Now that I have retrieved the cats from the top of the curtains, where they fled in discombobulation at all the irritated shouting, I have some Notes.

1. SO.
   
2. BADLY.
   
3. WRITTEN.
   
4. We have reached a stage of blockbuster movies which is a perfect and literal embodiment of Baudrillardian simulation: they are endlessly proliferating copies of copies, to the point where all sense of an originating real is lost. This was not a film narrative, it was an awkward conglomeration of acceptable plot elements hacked together into the overall, cargo-cultish shape of a film, and set shambling into the cultural landscape in the shrewd and practised hope that it would fool the moviegoers into paying money for it. Which in the event was clearly successful in the financial sense, but catastrophically otherwise for the plot.
   
5. A movie can't just be well-known heroic stereotypes enacting explosions, it needs a clear motivational thread to hold it together. And I realised very sharply last night that the thread needs, weirdly enough, to be moral: people need to do things because there is not just a practical but a philosophical reason to do them. Infinity War is trying in a half-arsed way to do some heavy philosophical lifting on the nature of evil, and the idea of sacrificing the individual for the overall good, but it can't hold the ideas together enough to do any sort of meaningful or consistent exploration. It tries to evoke them by passing reference, and assumes that's enough. As a result there was no actual logic to character reactions; not only did the vast majority of the supposedly pivotal and emotionally trying decisions fall under the category of Too Stupid To Live, they had no emotional impact, either, because they made no sense.
   
6. I don't care how much money the latest Thor film made and how much that owed to its campy humour: Infinity War had a much darker tone given its themes, and its writers aren't fit to run Taika Waititi's scripts down to the copy shop, and certainly weren't up to the challenge either of generating said humour or of mixing the two, so the humour attempts simply sounded lame, forced and out of place.
   
7. Infinite cosmic power is a narrative and cinematic trap. Not only would it be visually boring if properly realised, it's incredibly difficult to retain narrative drive and challenge in the face of it, and it makes laughable monkeys out of consistency. Examples are legion, but a random one that particularly narked me: given what Thanos can do with all except the last stone, there was absolutely no reason to treat the Wakandan forcefield as any sort of barrier, he could have taken it down with a fingersnap. It was clearly there to make pretty large-scale battlefields and induce artificial Plastic Trauma, TM. Unfortunately infinite cosmic power needs exceedingly clever scriptwriting, which this signally wasn't.
   
8. The film tried to make Thanos into a subjectivity, and he shouldn't have been. (a) because there wasn't enough narrative meat to make his motivations meaningful, and (b) because he's a narcissistic homicidal paternalistic wangst-ridden dickhead (literally) and the fact that the writers clearly found that interesting is everything you need to know about them in order to run screaming in the opposite direction.
   
9. Further to (8) above, if the most recurring feature of your so-called plot is the sustained theme of Men Feeling Plastic Conflict, TM, and having to angst about sacrificing women to it before deciding to sacrifice them anyway, your misogynistic pissbag writers need to be shot out of a cannon into the heart of the sun. Also, I don't think it's just my steady diet of slash which makes me see this, but there were altogether too many Default Heterosexual Romances in that movie. If the only emotional connection you can imagine between characters is a stereotypical romance, you have insufficient imagination to be writing film scripts.
   
10. The Avengers franchise has some significant cultural and character capital built up now, and this film cheerfully threw that into a handy black hole. There were too many characters in this film, and none of them did anything that made sense or developed them in any useful way, and nine tenths of the actors concerned are actually really good and deserved far better. And I'm not even going to get into the random deaths thing, because (a) they were unearned and had no emotional impact and I frankly didn't care, and (b) they'll probably all be rolled back because comics.
    
11. SO.
    
12. BADLY.
    
13. WRITTEN.

OK, that was cathartic, I feel better now. Although entirely inclined to be very, very wary of the upcoming Captain Marvel film, she's a brilliant character and survey says Marvel's moviemaking machine will chew her up and spit her out in tiny, plastic bits gummed together with sticky sexism. Woe.

2016 continues to deliver, in the sense of delivering pain and loss and the removal of hope. I am surprisingly devastated by the death of Carrie Fisher: I hadn't realised how much her role in Force Awakens had meant to me. Her feisty princess was, of course, integral to our investment in the original Star Wars trilogy, and her role as a female character was uncommonly powerful for the time - the antithesis of a passive damsel, she had both the personality and the political/tactical power to hold her own against the men. (Also, as I persist in thinking of Trump as Jabba the Hutt, there is considerable vindictive satisfaction in imagining her choking him with a chain, the action which was the archetypal denial of the chain-mail bikini and the female role it attempts to define).

But it was the mature Leia of Force Awakens who was most interesting, and whose loss I really mourn. The film created a powerful narrative place for her - a woman who has lost everything, home and family and political hope, and yet who continues to fight. We are given precious few female cinematic icons who are permitted to be experienced, mature, battered by life, wise, flawed, powerful, authoritative, instrumental - defined, in short, by something other than their sexuality. But the role worked because of who she was outside it - a gutsy, unabashed, irreverent older woman who had no truck with societal expectation, who called out misogyny and objectification, and who was frank and unashamed about her own struggles with substance abuse and mental illness. There's a lovely quote from her in The Princess Diarist in which she says about Star Wars that “Movies were meant to stay on the screen, flat and large and colorful, gathering you up into their sweep of story, carrying you rollicking along to the end, then releasing you back into your unchanged life. But this movie misbehaved. It leaked out of the theater, poured off the screen, affected a lot of people so deeply that they required endless talismans and artifacts to stay connected to it.” In a lot of ways she could have been talking about herself.

I am sad that she has had her life prematurely ended, because she was making a marvellous and inspiring thing out of her own difficulties. I am heartsore that we have lost both her real-life presence and voice as an anodyne to Hollywood stupidities, and her character in future Star Wars films. If we ever needed an icon for continued resistance against fascist, misogynist systems in the teeth of the odds, it's now. Fuck 2016.

(My subject line is from one of Carrie's own autobiographical books, in which she describes George Lucas's insistence that she not wear a bra with the white dress because "there's no underwear in space" and with weightlessness your body will expand but your bra won't, so it'll strangle you. Which is terrible science and everything you need to know about justifying objectification by mansplaining right there, but the point is that Carrie wanted my subject line to be her obituary, so it is.)

At this point 2016 can officially fuck right off and die. Seriously. I do not want this 2016, it is skraaatched. In my personal iconage, it has taken from us David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Sheri S. Tepper. It has given us Brexit, Donald Trump, destructive student protests and cancer in my cat. It and all its works can take a long fiery hike straight into the sun. Today it's the death of Leonard Cohen, who is not quite a personal icon but is still a Significant Good. It feels like adding insult to injury. Also, people keep posting covers of "Hallelujah", which infallibly makes me cry even in circumstances when significant portions of America haven't just lost the collective moral and political plot.

On the upside, Tumblr is circulating relevant post-election Cohen lyrics, namely from "Everybody Knows", which is a favourite of mine and also satisfyingly and appropriately despairing.

everybody knows that the dice are loaded
everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
everybody knows that the war is over
everybody knows the good guys lost
everybody knows the fight was fixed
the poor stay poor, the rich get rich
that’s how it goes
and everybody knows

In this dark time in American politics, I re-recommend you copperbadge's unabashedly fantasy wish-fulfilment political AU with the Avengers taking the White House. Leader of the Free World. Balm to the political soul.

Further in the Department of Frivolous Escapism With Which I Propose To Distract Myself, I hear really positive buzz about Mass Effect: Andromeda, whose release date has been delayed to next year, which is a Good Thing because if they released it in 2016, 2016 would infallibly fuck it up beyond redemption. Interesting details on the game's developments here; I like what they have apparently done to tweak the combat system, and I am really excited about the increased emphasis on character interactions, because as you all know I am a mad and desperate fangirl for Bioware character interactions. The statement "The squadmate with the least amount of lines in Andromeda has more lines than the squadmate with the most amount of lines in ME3" made me go "squeee!", although not quite as ear-splittingly as if they'd replaced "ME3" with "Inquisition". I shall set aside a two-week leave period around Andromeda's release date, upgrade my computer, and permit 2017 to establish its bona fides appropriately while waving two fingers in 2016's general direction. Because really.

Golux (1998-2015)

I am saddened to report that yesterday the Evil Landlord had to take the unpleasant and necessary decision to euthanase Golux, as the cancerous growths on her nose were no longer responding to palliative treatment and were causing her distress. And while I haven't shared space with Golux for eighteen months, she was my kitty for fifteen years, and I am sad, and missing her with a new poignancy.

When I moved in with the Evil Landlord, late in 1998, I had only the one cat, Fish of lamented memory and Death Star legend. The dreaded Thakky was responsible for our acquisition, several months later, of two kittens from Animal Welfare; she took us out there to select them, and paid for all the paperwork, as a house-warming present. (Best. Housewarming. Present. Ever.) We inspected cage after cage of wriggling kittens in various shades and at various stages of development. I wanted, particularly, one male and one female for reasons of personality balance, and at least one black cat because I missed Pixie and Polonius, the two black cats I'd owned previously. We found a small black female of approximately the right age who was the sole black spot in a seething mass of silver tabby/white siblings, and the nice schoolkid volunteer who was assisting us solemnly held up all said siblings to inspect their nether regions, finally handing over one he swore was male. The black kitten became Todal, and the tabby/white "male" Golux. The vet later, and with some mockery, disabused us of the "male" assumption, so it's fortunate the name works as gender-neutral. But I swear the initial gender mis-assignment somehow shaped her character, or at least those parts of it that were hesitant, thoughtful and slightly confused.

Todal and Golux were named from James Thurber's Thirteen Clocks; the Todal is an agent of the devil sent to punish evil-doers for not doing as much evil as they should, which is everything you need to know about Todal the cat right there. (Favourite pastime: sitting on top of the bookshelf and knocking the row of yarn cones onto the floor deliberately, one by one). Tracy always maintained that we doomed her to that personality with the name, and we should have called her Cream-Puff if we wanted a less evil feline. By that logic we possibly also created Golux: the book-Golux is an odd, gentle, offbeat little character who's invisible at will, and whose essentially good nature is slightly hapless and bumbling.

Thurber's description says that "his eyes were wide and astonished, as if everything were happening for the first time", which expresses something of the sweetly naive element to Golux's character. I obviously chose the name because the kitten was fairly shy and retiring from the first, but either it was an inspired choice, or a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Or I over-anthropomorphise my cats. Jo suggested the other day that most people share space with slightly alien little cat-entities, where I have relationships with colourful feline personalities. It's a fair cop.) It makes me obscurely happy that if you do a Google image search for "thurber golux" you'll pull up a photo of Golux from this blog about two screens down.

Golux was a gentle soul, tending towards the solemnly thoughtful in her responses: she always had to think about things for a minute or so before she did them. She used to sit out in the back courtyard, watching the tendrils of water slowly creep across the paving stones from where I'd been watering the potplants. She could sit there for ten minutes at a time, her ears at an angle denoting extreme interest, but eventually all she'd do would be to put out a paw and touch the water, gently, in an experimental mode. She was, conversely, a talented sneak-thief, with an amazingly ability to climb onto the kitchen counter after food with such nonchalance that I wouldn't register the movement despite being a few metres away and looking in approximately the right direction.

She was a very pretty cat; she had the dramatic Gothy eye-makeup which comes with that silver tabby coat, and her white bits - paws, shirt front, one front leg, as though she'd stepped into a paint pot accidentally - were always immaculate. Her little pink nose was inordinately cute, but of course ended up killing her, given its incompatibility with African sunlight. I was particularly fond of the black tips to her ears, which gave her a sharply defined silhouette - I think my header photo was taken by Dylan, it's one of my favourites of her because the tips are so clearly pronounced, like a caracal's. She always sat very neatly, with her tail curled around her feet.

She was very much my cat, although technically the Evil Landlord and I co-owned her and Todal; she spent a lot of time sitting on my desk, and she slept on my bed every night, usually joining me just after I'd switched off the light. She'd come through the bathroom window, and I could always hear her approach because she talked to herself, a succession of gentle, conversational, slightly plaintive yowls all across the courtyard, in through the window, and across the room to my bed. We used to think of it as her existential angst - sometimes she'd wander around the back courtyard meeping gently to herself for no apparent reason other than requesting from the universe some revelation about the meaning of life. If you put her in a box to take her to the vet (which was always difficult, her command of body language was exquisite and she'd make a break for it the instant you even thought about boxing her) she'd commentate continuously all the way there in chesty, baritone, Siamese-sounding yowls. She always held a grudge longer than the other cats - days, often, before she'd forgive you for a vet trip or a de-fleaing. There were unfortunately a lot of vet trips, as we combated the cancerous spots as well as we could; we kept up the treatments over seven or eight years, giving her a lot of life she wouldn't have otherwise had, so I feel as though her final end was only after a hard fight in which we did everything we could.

I didn't take Golux with me when I moved out of the Evil Landlord's place: we knew she had limited time left, and I didn't want to put her through the stress of relocating her. I think it was the right choice, even though I missed her a lot. Eckie and Danielle gave her a safe and tranquil and loving place to end her days, and I'm enormously grateful to them for looking after her, and for making the difficult and necessary call to let her go. I hope that she enriched their lives as much as she did, in her quiet way, mine. The full quote from Thirteen Clocks in my subject line is the Golux speaking, and reads: "I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart." She did that.

I am extremely bronchitissed, and am dragging myself around in a pale and glandular state pausing only for demented and unnecessarily Gothic coughing fits. Also, my mother goes back to the UK today, or will do if she can persuade herself to untie herself from the leg of the dining room table. (She really doesn't want to go). We gave her larney High Tea at the Mount Nelson yesterday in honour of her 70th birthday next month, but it's hardly a consolation.

Fortunately, for woes such as the above there are marshmallow owls. Marshmowls. A concept so utterly logical it's unthinkable that no-one has thunk it before. I have somewhat repentantly stolen this off a Tumblr blog called Courtart, and suggest you follow the link both to assuage my guilt, and because there's an animated gif version where they bop.



She captions this "The rare, medium, and well-done marshmowls." Of course.

God, but horrible things happen to students. I have just sat in a readmission appeals committee for six hours, giving curriculum input on all these poor kids. Apart from the usual transition shock and the need to struggle through the challenges posed by finance, housing and travel issues and the truly appalling academic grounding provided by all too many of our schools, we have today contemplated the lives of young people suffering date rape, violent rape, assault, theft of laptops and books, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, unplanned pregnancy, serious illness, hospitalisation, AIDs diagnosis, estrangement, the illness and/or death of sometimes multiple family members, bizarre legal wrangles, learning disabilities, social stigmatisation, victimisation, stalkers, and the occasional curse. I can identify what I call a "depression transcript" at a single glance - the horribly revealing slow slide from competence into lower marks, a few fails, and finally the long, telling strings of absences. A day like that, you start wondering if anyone ever succeeds at anything at all before the inevitable nastinesses get them.

I want to have several cups of tea, a good cry, and an evening of vegging out on the sofa in front of something incredibly Hollywood and fluffy. Except I can't, because they stole the TV. It'll have to be the old fallbacks, viz. Skyrim and fanfic. Anything that distracts from the feeling of complete helplessness in the face of evil.

If I meep and tremble at odd stimuli a bit in the near future, please don't hold it against me. I have too high a bloody empathy stat for this job, is all.

I have to say, along with Hoban "Wash" Washburne, that with 2011 we experienced "a little problem with our entry sequence". The last few years have not been kind to me and mine: 2009 was father's illness, 2010 was father's death, and I'd hoped that by 2011 the cosmic wossnames would have shot their bolt and we'd experience an upward trend. Instead, the pitch of entry has caused the outer casing to overheat and the wings to fall off. 2011 was a complete bugger, marked both by my increasing lack of happiness in this job, and by a new and interesting chapter in Things My Body Inflicts On Me Out Of Perverse Sadistic Glee. I am not leaping joyously into 2012 so much as crawling over the finish line while 2011 sits panting behind me, the bloodied scraps of fabric in its jaws all that remains of the seat of my pants. (Bizarrely mixed metaphors in this paragraph brought to you at no additional cost).

Thus, the usual scorecard is somewhat unbalanced in its 2011 iteration. It also completely ignores global trends and disasters to focus, as usual, on the purely personal. Thusly:

• Things achieved by me this year: international travel on my Cherished Institution's dime. Survival of life-threatening illness. Survival of concomitant post-illness chronic fatigue. Invitation to give a keynote paper at a conference next year, albeit a small conference. Invitation to submit paper to special edition of journal, on Miyazaki, so score. Relative success at doing my job despite being absent from it for about three months, and validation from superiors in proof of same. With assistance of therapist and my, as usual, incredibly wonderful friends both real and virtual, something vaguely approaching mental health in endurance of all of the above.
  
• Things discovered this year: Dragon Age, Eureka, Lillian Jackson Braun, She Wants Revenge, retro Golden Age superhero comics, the Avengers, Skyrim, buying a new computer specifically for gaming, Dark Angel, Melbourne, the reality of deep vein thrombosis on long haul flights, compression socks, anti-depressants, Questionable Content, bras that fit, Lego, Dollhouse, growing out my fringe.
  
• Things not achieved by me: as usual, fleeing the country, crushing academia beneath my booted heel, enough writing, enough exercise. Any of the end-2010 resolutions about having a better year. Most importantly, the actual writing any of the above papers owing to aforementioned fatigue. Possibly as a result of all the therapy, I am bizarrely inclined to actually cut myself some slack for this.
  
• Resolutions for the new year: attempt to continue the process of cutting myself slack on the fatigue, while simultaneously resolving both to cautiously exercise towards actual health, and not to use fatigue and Skyrim as excuses for protcrastination. Writing of kick-butt papers variously for the journal special issue, for the May Harry Potter conference, and for two additional fairy-tale conferences in August/September. Fiendish political strategising to bend the structure and expectations of this job to my inflexible will. More socialising with all the lovely friends I've hardly seen owing to fatigue and inexorable hedgehogginess.

I spurn 2011 as the dust beneath my chariot wheels, and look sternly at 2012. Shape up, dammit. In the global sense, but particularly in the particular.

The latest Discworld novel, Snuff, is out: my copy arrived yesterday, and I spent the evening flat on the sofa devouring it. It's one in the Vimes series, and my ongoing state of more or less drooling Pratchett fangirliness means I prepared for it by re-reading the entirety of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch novels over the last two weeks, from Guards! Guards! onwards, in mostly chronological order. (Strict chronological order is actually not possible, one of them being a time-travel novel, and in fact going back to Guards! Guards! after Night Watch was unexpectedly illuminating. But I digress).

For me Ankh-Morpork is Pratchett's greatest creation, the central trope of the Discworld - a multi-centuried, unabashed urban sprawl whose existence adds point and ferocity to his ongoing cultural critique. The city is the means by which he deconstructs not only the limp utopianism of mainstream fantasy, but issues of human fallibility, good and evil and the impossibility of their simplicity in a complicated modern world. I cherish an affection for the wizards and for Moist von Lipwig (partially, I think, because Going Postal has such an elegant plot), but Vimes is the sword-point of the Ankh-Morpork stories. He's an amazing construct, even more so than Moist because he's older, more experienced, the accumulation of a particularly driven and compelling experience of hardship, disillusionment and redemption.

He has also matured beautifully over the Watch series - reading them all together like that makes you appreciate not just the development of the character, but the development of Pratchett's style and punch; moments in the first couple of novels falter, but the voice and purpose are always strong and true. The Watch series steadily grows in sophistication and believability, peaking in the essentially political explorations of power and agency and race in Fifth Elephant and Nightwatch and Thud. (I also love the Watch presence in Monstrous Regiment, but it's an outsider perspective on a cameo appearance). Thud also dealt beautifully with Vimes's new fatherhood status, and I was really looking forward to seeing where that went as Young Sam grew up.

And yet that concentrated re-read is also a worrying perspective: my expectations of Snuff were tinged with concern even before I cracked it open. I also re-read Unseen Academicals, the last adult Discworld novel before Snuff; it's an Ankh-Morpork novel, but not a Watch novel, and it represents, I think, a drop-off. The story, and the fun poked at football and the University, are entertaining and real, but the novel feels scattered and overstuffed, its themes and ideas all over the place and not always properly developed. (The whole Jools/modelling/dwarf armour bit? very funny, but I'm not sure what it's doing there). It felt like Pratchett, though; the prose and bite and people were unmistakeable, clearly the master driving the stagecoach even if the horses were tending to shy and bolt and the whole equipage threatened at some moments to career off the road at a tight corner.

Snuff didn't actually feel like Pratchett. It was clearly a Pratchett plot, pillorying the aristocracy with verve and accuracy, and continuing the novels' ongoing exploration of race and prejudice. (One of its more amusing, if sadly under-developed, intertexts is Jane Austen). But the prose isn't Pratchett, and nor, more tragically, are the characters. I barely recognised Vimes; he has a hesitation, an internal lack of certainty which feel simply wrong, and his relationship with Sibyl, hitherto always a matter more of implication than of actual representation, is over-described, verging on the mawkish. Young Sam becomes an excuse for toilet humour, which the Discworld has up until now always mercifully relegated to glancing suggestion. I don't associate Pratchett with obvious fart jokes, nor do I wish to.

And this last, like the Vimes/Sybil relationship, comes down, quite simply, to writing: it's not the story elements that are the problem, it's how they're handled. Pratchett's prose has always been restrained and muscular, his comic timing dependent on perfect control, language welded to purpose. There's none of that here. The prose frankly wanders; characters go off into long speeches, which is the antithesis of the punchy and economical storytelling of earlier novels. We are continually given exposition which describes characters' internal life rather than, as before, being able to apprehend it through their actions. I itched, while reading, to go through a lot of these sentences and reduce them to actual Pratchett with a red pen. He's in there somewhere, but only in momentary glimmers.

And, of course, the giant world-supporting elephant in the room is Pratchett's illness. I love this man and his books. His world and ideas have given me enormous amounts of unalloyed pleasure and insight, as they have to his huge fandom at large. I have lost count of the number of times I have read the Discworld novels; I will return to them for the rest of my life. And it's precisely this affection and respect which make it difficult to simply say that the Alzheimers is, of course, making a difference: that this is not the Pratchett we knew. If you read across random reviews of the last few novels there's a reticence in them which skirts around the idea of a loss of control. He is no longer able to type now, he dictates to a typist; that has to, surely, change the nature of your relationship with the words? But to come out and say that he's losing his grip on the literary magic feels like a betrayal of the novels' comic status, an admission of the tragedy of his illness which, by being spoken, becomes all too real.

And I deny that. If the Discworld stands for anything, it's for using the twin lenses of fantasy and comedy to look reality firmly in the face. I will not pretend that this novel is up to Pratchett's usual standard as a way of pretending that, as his readers, we are not confronting the horribly unjust reality of his disintegration. We are. To deny that loss is to betray the integrity of the man and his creation.

I will continue to buy anything Pratchett writes for as long as he cares to go on writing. I will do it because he's Pratchett; I will read his books for the occasional moment when the unalloyed man shines through, when the prose and punch rise out of the wandering and click into place. I will mourn when he stops writing - hell, I'm crying as I write this - but the reality is that to read this novel is already to mourn.