The Business: The Tools To Make Old Media Irrelevant Are Here

Checking in on the state of AI content creation. Skyebrows dropped this a few weeks ago.

Naysayers are going to have problems with their objections.

This took 400 hours. Check his channel. This is what he is able to do now; it is not what he could do earlier this year. The models and his own acumen have advanced so much so soon that he--and other so capable with these tools--are going to surpass the average professional going without AI assistance or tools by the end of this year.

Couple this with the sort of tools we're seeing with AI-assisted writing and publishing and we are going to see not only one-man publishing operations, but one man IP farms within a few years. The combination of Agentic AI, workflow automation, cross-platform operation, and integration with known tools or services like Stripe and Canva are going to make it possible to do all of the following entirely in-house.

• Develop your own stories at speed and adjust them on a dime and bring them to market in manuscript form entirely on your own.
• Produce prose, comic, audio, and visual adapations of your own material entirely in-house in multiple languages without needing outside talent.
• Design and publish your own merch entirely in-house without needing to hire outside talent or maintain overhead.
• Establish, administer, and update your own online storefronts by yourself without any expert coding.
• Do all your own Public Relations without needing to hire an expert.
• Do all of this without working 80+ per week, but closer to 20 and thus be able to maintain a healthy home and civic life- you'll be able to raise your kids and be involved in local affairs so Commies can't bend you over without you knowing.

I said that your new skillset is Project Management, not grunt work, going forward. Seeing how the tools are working, and developing fast, towards that reality will force you (and everyone else) to contend with the oncoming reality of a changed economy where no you don't have to put up with Jeets and Girlbosses and systematic discrimination in the job market and all that horseshit.

As the tools get better, and the friction involved in learning and mastering them decreases, the reason to bother with the declining institutions fades away.

It was a good time to go indie a decade ago. It's becoming a great time now, if you can afford the tools and be bothered to master them.

The Culture: We Remember, In September

On this day in 1683:

And because you're expecting it, the video-

-and the movie.

Also, books. Good reads.

The Culture: The Cargo Cult Shows Its Ass, And The Bros Show They Grok It Better Than The Cult Does

Lots of problems solved by their Cargo Cult and Theater Kid priors being taken out back and shot.

Meanwhile, over at Substack, Jeffro recently talked about unfucking this crap.

Why would you “convert” your game to a Braunstein? This is just weird framing all around. Consider: 1) You can delegate monsters to an adversary player in order to work out how a particular entity will respond to player activity. 2) You can set up a session Braunstein in a single region of the campaign map and then fold the results into the overall campaign state. 3) You can run more traditional style adventure scenarioswhile exploring a mix of competition and cooperation both during session play and also in down time. 4) You can set up a fluid conflict between two distinct adventure parties to be played out over several sessions. 5) You can run a sessionless battle scenario over a span of several weeks with troop movements and a mix of strategy and tactics. None of these options require a consensus or significant cooperation from more than a handful of people for any length of time. The only person preventing you from doing this is you.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

Not there won't be resistance, but until the AI DMs come online it's Dexter or Death for these people so wear the black hat and Dexter them for their own good.

That resistance has its root in its wrong assumption of what this hobby is, as Rule of Thule explained.

It’s not an objection to something happening elsewhere, it’s an objection to something real happening—to the game being actually played. Consider an abstract game played in a vast abstract space. Within the spaces are two kinds of players: Navelgazers (Ns) and Conquerors (Cs). The Ns believe that all players are Navelgazers and have a shared common understanding of rules that don’t actually exist in the game such as “don’t be unkind towards the pieces of other players” or so on. The Ns are playing a fundamentally different game from the Cs because they presume restrictions and protections etc. which do not truly exist (i.e. they are not actually rules of the game). When they see something that is the product of real play, they will immediately identify that it doesn’t accord with their presumptions. “No one who was trying to Avoid Unkindness [or other such presumptive descriptors] would have engineered this situation.” As soon as they see signs of the game being played to win, they are immediately on the defensive. This explains much of the maligning of powergamers, as Meffridus intuitively understood, because they represent the same threat: that someone will undo the fake game by leaning into the real one.

- RuleOfThule

Read on Substack

David Sirlin talked about this concept in the context of versus fighters. There are players (he calls them “scrubs”) who come into a tournament with the idea that e.g. certain moves are “unfair” or “cheap” and, despite the obvious signs that these moves are clearly powerful, will be shocked and appalled when they are blasted to pieces by other players “abusing” them. The scrub’s false internalization of the rules has caused him to become blind to the game’s actual rules and has led him, on his path of player development, to not only navigate false spaces but to arbitrarily close doors whose opening is necessary for him to achieve his real potential. In the arena of RPGs, we see that scrubs have found ways to form coalitions. They have the ability to aggregate in collectives. Their particular internalizations are not only sanctified by Rule Zero, but each distinct collective can claim membership under a united Rule Zero collective—so long as they acknowledge all the others—and they feel emboldened to claim that no one can tell them they aren’t playing the game, even when they’ve thrown out half the rules and added others. These coalitions are akin to a rogue tournament scene where everyone involved must abide by the new made-up rules, and anyone who insists on following the plain rules can be exiled. We can see the effects of this everywhere. I think it’s no coincidence that Sirlin’s book is titled Playing to Win.

- RuleOfThule

Read on Substack

This is simple to handle. You don't announce the changes; you just implement them step-by-step until you're in full Braunstein mode.

And remember, it's easier thank you think to teach the real game to people. The Internet is not real life, something Cargo Cultists cannot comprehend.

The Business: Explaining Why Big Corpo Hates The Hobby

Last week and over last weekend, Gamza laid bare what Games Workshop is doing and why.

The TLDR is that GW is doing this:

Which means this.

This requires the infantilization of the audience, and Cult Psychology is the proven method to achieve this state.

By doing this, a successful Brand Cult (a Pop Cult) is able to get away with ridiculous things without relying on technical architecture because you make it emotionally painful to contemplate Doing It Yourself instead of swiping the card to buy the Approved Merchandise.

Couple that with deliberately and frequently unbalancing the game and creating a competitive environment--and no, you don't need a playmode of direct PVP to do this; compeititive PVE can and will do this just fine as the MMO world proved over 25 years ago--and you have what you need to create the very Pay To Win conditions we see today in so much gaming media.

Wizards of the Coast's many announced changes will have the aim of creating this effect within its own Walled Garden, and because it is already a proven business model it will succeed and part of that success will come from privledging sweaty tryhard Whales over everyone else- just as we see with 40K, MTG, World of Warcraft (Retail AND Classic alike, and spread successfully to FF14 too, via Race To World First events).

You cannot maintain a commercially viable operation in such an environment, anymore than any MMO game could after WOW hit big. The pattern, repeated across generations and across continents, proves that once this takes hold in whomever wields the Network Effect it will dominate that entire sector of the economy and culture thereafter in a positive feedback loop.

The changes are already felt; every would-be competitor to 40K and Fantasy end up having its players demonstrating the behaviors that make copying GW's moves a no-brainer, just as every MMO post-WOW ends up aping WOW sooner or later because that formula works.

You cannot avoid this now and stand a chance of winning in the commercial space. You can only go non-commercial as a glorified hobbyist or be a grifting faggot like Colville and stay in the Cargo Cult. Otherwise you have to quit the Cult entirely, abandon all pretension of being Le Hecken Game Designer, and just be a hobbyist at the Clubhouse.

The Business: Observing The Automation Of Publishing In Action

Last week Future Fiction Academy dropped this video.

This is what you folks need to comprehend: AI allows ONE MAN to become a full Publishing House.

You can train a LLM to write in a specific authorial voice. You can set up Setting Bibles, Style Guides, and other authorial documents that get called up when generating copy and then the automation string executes the draft/revise process while you do higher-order operations that demand full attention to properly execute or discharge other obligations (such as looking after children or elders). You can then hit up Midjourney, Grok, etc. to generate your covers, which then plug directly into Canva to produce both ebook and print covers; you can also do this for automatic layout of manuscripts to ensure desired fonts (and font sizes, and drop-caps, etc.), generate the Table of Contents automatically, format the book for both print and ebook, etc. while you are handling the marketing and advertising- including booking podcast appearances.

This is what has OldPub freaking out; this technology cuts out all of those Crazy Cat Ladies and their Boss Bitch juniors in New York and London, killing their capacity to wage Narrative Warfare via gatekeeping and financial control. This is why there is all this performative faggotry directed at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. to make a Scarlet Letter of AI despite all online tech already incorporating it as levels these people cannot notice and do not perceive.

It's getting cheaper and cheaper to do this. It's getting easier and easier to do this. More and more tools are being made that can plug into workflows like this, either via the use of agentic AI or by hand (e.g. you generating your own art via Grok or Midjourney to insert into a layout tool). As I said previously, this forces authors into higher-value skillsets because being a copymonkey doesn't work anymore. You need to be a publisher, not a writer, and publishing means entrepreneurial business skills and acumen.

In other words:

You better learn how to sell. No AI can do that for you.

Admin: The Annual Return Approaches

My birthday is a month from today.

I know the ritual. Folks in the family want to know what I want for my birthday, and since it's two months before Xmas I might as well put my Wish List in order.

So that's done: Amazon (Appendix N Lit, Concept Art Books, General Anime, Genre Fiction Media, Gundam Media, History Media, Middle-Earth Media, Miscellaneous, Old West Literary Canon), Steam, GOG- all sorted. In addition, the big lists I don't keep online (firearms, transit, services, Things Only (U)HNWIs Can Do For Me) are all also updated and I remind you that gift cards are always appreciated.

Additions this year include: a year of Twitter Premium, upgrading my PC's graphics card (not by much; I'm aiming for the 6GB version of my current card), a Palladium Grab Bag (if live by that point; if not they will before XMas) and this print of the original cover art for A Princess of Mars, a hardcopy of D&D: An American Institution, and someone somehow finding a print copy of the Robotech: Expeditionary Force Marines Sourcebook.

The Business: Games Workshop Is Fucked

One-two of videos showing why GW is fucked and deserves it.

Yes, this will happen and sweet fuck-all will work to prevent it.

The next step will be to be able to print models with the desired color scheme imparted in the printing process, killing that tedious bitchwork that is painting the damned widgets.

This will force GW to stop being focused on pushing minis and instead focus on what their real business value is: providing secure locations to play the fucking game.

It would be nice if they also bothered to put money into producing proper fucking rules and manuals, but they won't because tri-annual edition churn has been their business model since the 1980s and they ain't stopping now even though they are in dire need of doing exactly that.

So go ahead, pirate that shit and print away. Fuck GW, and flat-out lie to them if they ask if your minis are Official Product.