Continuing his media tour, Dragon Award winner and nominee Brian Niemeier appeared on the Superversive Livestream yesterday to promote his upcoming military SF novel Combat Frame XSeed, and you will have a good time listening to this podcast if you enjoyed the Geek Gab appearance.
If you haven't taken the opportunity to back his Indiegogo campaign, go here and get a guaranteed e-book in November (in addition to whatever else you put your money down for). This man is the editor for Reavers of the Void, so you know he's got an eye for making good stories better, and thus is worthy of your support.
The RPG Pundit put out a video about the survey that Wizards of the Coast recently put out about Dungeons & Dragons.
He wasn't the only one suspecting this. I did too, and seeing that the survey's cooked to push this meme disease is sufficient confirmation for me to decide to cut WOTC off entirely (and with it, all versions of D&D after Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition). This is the softer form of "Getting Woke", and just like the hard SJW form the result is the same: You Go Broke.
Fuck this for a game of soldiers. Time to burn the Sea-Tac Complex to the ground and burn out the cult with it. The Pundit was right, again.
The senior author among we doing #AGundam4Us, Dragon Award winner and nominee, returns as a guest to Geek Gab today to talk Combat Frame XSeed and the Indiegogo campaign to crowdfund it. You don't want to miss this, so I'm posting this before it happens just to ensure that you have plenty of time to either make the time to catch this live and participate in the chat or to wait on the replay to become available for you to listen to ASAP after the fact.
If you haven't been to the campaign page yet, then point your browser here and pledge your support. Brian's proven himself a solid science fiction author, so you know he's good on delivering both the goods and the expectations he sets. If there's anyone amongst us worthy of support, it's him.
And if you're looking for more about my stuff, this week's Study post is live.
Back with another video, The RPG Pundit has some wisdom to dispense regarding what any other gaming format would rightly regard as cheating: fudging dice rolls.
It's the Pundit. You should know by now what to expect from him. If you think he's big on this, you don't know the man.
I'm not going to gild this lily. I will go where the Pundit won't: never fudge the dice rolls. It ceases to be a game when you do that, and once that's gone the core of the medium's appeal is gone with it- the virtual testing of one's skill and acumen against whatever situation comes your way, with the GM as no more than Crom--a neutral, disinterested arbiter and referee who gives no shits if your man lives or dies--and as such your wins are your own as well as your losses. The accomplishment is virtual, but they are still real in a properly run tabletop RPG campaign.
I've been at this long enough to see what happens when players know that the dice aren't the final word. It warps the perceptions, often completely out of bounds, and more than a few times I've seen players flat-out troll the GM with doing things that they know force more fudging to preserve whatever the GM is trying to keep in once piece until the GM gives up and either stops doing it or kills the campaign. In short, it inevitably leads to freakouts like the death on Critical Role did, and it's not fun.
Just don't. Let their man suffer and die when the dice screw them; crunch them all, and the players--if they really want to play--will just reroll and play on. (Which is another reason for why slow PC generation and complex PC mechancs are bad; it makes rerolling painful when it shouldn't. Basic D&D and Classic Traveller got this right.)
The World Class Bullshitters got this out earlier today. The headline alone is good news.
The news isn't all sunshine and roses, but this is good news. Bob Iger finally did what we expected and reined in Culty Kathy. That he's the face behind these comments and announcements is a sign that someone doesn't want to Go Broke, and we can hope this leads to the house-cleaning that we want done in Lucasfilm for a while now.
Hopefully this is not glad-handing, and we'll soon see if it is or not, but--at the very least--the practice of a film a year will end and that's a good thing; go back to the tri-annual release that Uncle George established and don't do side-stories until your main sequence plan is finished. (Hint: Side Stories are what you do on TV.) It turns out that the return of Clone Wars was more than just a cheap, desperate ploy; it was a sign that sanity was coming back.
The turn came before this point, but we're now seeing that Captain Marvel is where the poz took hold for certain. The MCU has had mistakes due to the SJWs elsewhere exerting influence, but now they're inside the studio and convergence comes good and hard. What's below is excerpt from the World Class Bullshitters' morning show, "Good Morning Pop Culture", and addresses this.
In short, I fully expect a repeat of Black Panther: lots of sound and fury, lots of flash, and then forgotten until the character appears in Avengers 4.
That's not good. No movie lead should be so forgettable, and neither should it inspire contempt in the target audience, but we can expect that from this film due to the politics surrounding it. No, the lead actress isn't doing herself, the film, or the franchise any favors with her behavior to date (or in the future since she hasn't gotten the memo yet).
At this rate we can expect a collapse mirroring that of the Star Wars franchise in a fraction of the time once the original cadre of film stars leave the franchise, and when that happens we can expect the Bullshitters to document the merchandise's failure as they have for the once-great brainchild of Uncle George (as we can see here)>. Unless Feige unfucks himself, the MCU is doomed; seeing a franchise rises and fall in just over a decade is something business schools a generation or so hence will study to see why SJW cultism (in whatever form it takes later on) is not good for business.
The Supreme Dark Lord made a big comics-related announcement tonight on the Arkstream:
This is what I've been talking about for a while now: independent SF authors need to strike deals with independent comics players to adapt novels into comics. Someone's been listening, because this is now happening. This is a big deal because Vox Day sees, as I do, that this sort of move is necessary for the future viability of independent fiction as a business enterprise; sure, plenty of readers still exist, but far more prefer comics and audiobooks over prose (and an order of magnitude or more prefer film/TV, but that's getting ahead of ourselves).
It's going to go beyond crowdfunding efforts soon, because this is the sort of move that builds not only an audience but also the infrastructure that satisfies that audience's demand. It's clear that Vox looks to be able to keep what Arkhaven (and Dark Legion) publishes available long after the crowdfunding campaign is done and backers get their stuff, and that this is going to take some time to work out the details, but once he's got that sorted he'll move to threaten not only the Big Two in the U.S. but their counterparts in Europe in a very short time.
By this time next year, the only comicbook publishers that aren't going to be worried about Arkhaven/Dark Legion will be the Japanese publishers and their Korean and Chinese counterparts. Once I have the prose versions of #StarKnight sorted, it looks like my first choice for comic adaptation publishing will be Arkhaven (and if I can do that in the aesthetic of my source material, so much the better). I expect that my fellow #AGundam4Us authors will come to the same conclusion as this project bears fruit.
