Thursday, May 31, 2018

Patterns in Revealed Preference: The Science Fiction Pattern

This is the oldest of the three patterns. It is also the deviation, as this pattern wasn't accidentally encountered but deliberately engineered. QuQu Media's video presentation, which I've reposted recently, gets deep into the details of the whos, hows, and whys so I won't repeat them here. Instead, I will proceed presuming that you've done so; if you haven't, go watch that first and come back when you're done.

In the episodes for the tabletop RPG and MMORPG expressions of the pattern, the change of the original form of the game into the current form happened because the creators did not comprehend what they had and changed the game to conform to a demographic change in the users that played the game- a shift that brought its own preconceptions to the table and insisted on officializing them.

The SF pattern reverses this. The expression of the pattern is the means by which a hostile outside clique infiltrated the existing SF scene and seized control of it; they replaced the original audience with one amenable to their influence and control, electing their own audience and customers. The Leftist cliques knew what they were doing when they did it, and they desired the effects that manifested; they saw SF as a vital cultural institution, and seized control of it to shape the minds of future generations, and they succeeded in doing so.

What is interesting is that this oldest expression of the pattern is a deliberate creation, whereas the later expressions are accidental and emergent phenomena, as if these later patterns are echoes of the engineered original. It is also interesting to note that this engineering had no purchase outside the West, and varies in what effect it had outside the Anglosphere; for a plan meant to swindle its way to power, it turned out to be myopic to an astonishing degree- an oversight whose consequences are now being felt by those same parties' successors.

The other interesting thing is the reaction to the #PulpRev scene and others like it, those who successfully recovered the truth from the memory hole and are using this to go back and build anew using a fork off the old pulp era. Unless the MMORPG and tabletop examples, the opposition is real here- but no less weak, if not impotent, and reliant on scaring away would-be customers like the villain of a Scooby Doo episode.

The revealed preferences here are interesting, because they come from the side that usually wishes to exploit them- not express them. They avoid conflict whenever possible, employing deception to gaslight targets into positions that favor them, and then they import wholesale a hostile population to do the dirty work of consolidating their power grab; they have plausible deniability (so long as the glamor holds) and so gaslight further with fraudulent claims of inevitability. What's going on politically in the West at-large went on in SF generations before, and the resemblance is uncanny--too much so to be an accident--and thus feels like a trial run.

It's said that politics is downstream from culture, but this puts that fact into a weaponized state and wields like a hammer.

Also revealed is the abhorrence of any possible resistance--as it is also competition--and the preference to suppress, by whatever means necessary, that resistance. If the Big Five could, they would hire killers and have every #PulpRev (et. al.) figure killed and outlet destroyed; their fellow travelers in and around government do this routinely. Character assassination, therefore, is what they resort to because literal assassination is off the table; count on them going along with any scheme that favors them and freeze out competition, such as the EU draft legislation on copyright.

This has implications and consequences for the other two examples. I think the echo concept is the most valid one, and I'll wrap this up tomorrow with a focus on that and how I think it will play out.

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Patterns in Revealed Preference: The MMO Pattern

In MMORPGs we have two significant expressions of the pattern. The first was Runescape. The second is World of Warcraft. In both cases we have a game that developed a fork when a significant mass of players decided that they wanted an older version of the game because that version better fulfilled their gameplay desires than the current edition. Runescape's old-school form is now official, and has been for a while; World of Warcraft has not launched its official old-school fork yet, but the unofficial ones remain sufficiently popular to compel the official version's launch.

The pattern is the same in its development. The developers did not fully comprehend what they had when they launched the original version that hit so big (especially so for WOW), so when the succeeding cohorts came along and complained that the game did not work the way that they thought that it should, the developers changed the game to conform to those preconceptions. Over time the character of the game--and therefore the experience of playing it--turned off the original cohort, who would go on to establish the unofficial revivals of the original game.

Unlike the D&D experience, this being a videogame it is trivial to look up videos and compare the experiences of the current edition vs. the classic one. You can see the system in operation, observing the inputs and outputs. The full extent of these games' content, rules, and mechanics got fully documented well before such an effort began with D&D which made the forking and restoration easier to do and maintain- important for when officialdom opposes the effort.

The result is that we can see that, despite sharing a name and aethestics, Class and Current are totally different games and therefore serve totally different audiences. This awareness is now mainstreaming, and not just in MMORPGs; the tabletop RPG world is slowly accepting this as true also, which will have positive effects going forward so long as the major player doesn't go Full Retard and attempt to stomp out the Classic fork. ("Attempt", of course, because success is impossible; Blizzard can't stomp out the Vanilla private servers, so you know WOTC can't even begin to stop retro-D&D.)

The secondary result is that the contrast between the Current and the Classic games--in both media--reveal the preferences of the served audience, and they are similar: acceptance of a competitive attitude towards the game, acceptance that player skill is a vital component for success, a depreciation of One True Hero narratives in favor of Just An Adventurer psudeo-wargame aethestics, and the shunning of narrative tropes as well as metagame convenience tropes infringing upon the gameplay experience- and that experience is one that prizes the immersion into the world most of all.

The Classic mode of play is classically masculine in its character, ethics, and approach. The Current mode is significantly feminine, with its focus on keeping everyone happy ("game balance"), feeling special (One True Hero), depreciation of skill (storygaming, et. al.), and prizing of convenience (Looking For Dungeon, Organized Play, et. al.), and Big Daddy backup in officialdom to stop the meanies while depreciating the facing of challenges and other examples of overcoming adversity. (You have no idea just how bad a lot of current WOW players are.) The Classic mode is a proper game; the Current mode is an experience that looks like a game, like how Gone Home is not a real game, but an experience (and not a good one at that).

People looking for feels trips are not loyal customers. People looking for challenges are. This too is now revealed by behavior.

And this has consequences, which are not hard to fathom, going forward.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Patterns in Revealed Preference: The Tabletop RPG Pattern

Dungeons & Dragons created an entire category of game by taking skirmish-scale wargames and focusing upon the hero figure. By the 1980s and the publishing of the classic Mentzer Red Box, the medium (and game) had taken on its mature form as a thing separate and distinct from the wargames it forked from.

The original form of the game, the version that hit big and went on to have influence far out-sized for its presence, focused upon the exploration of unknown lands and mysterious locations and looting the treasures therein. It was Sword & Sorcery, not Tolkien, and it was glorious.

But the totes-Tolkien crowd took over and reshaped the game over the years, and that opening came with Lorraine Williams winning the office political war over the company; in her desire to consolidate her hold over TSR, she opened the door for those willing and able to do away with Gary's vision of the game to do so. They did, and the successive cohorts of players coming in with that conception went along with the changes (more or less) in the game and its official settings.

The results over the years accelerated with D&D's third edition. More and more people, dissatified with the medium, went to alternative media that does what they wanted out of an RPG better. Rather than check to see if the changes made had anything to do with this trend, most in the medium doubled-down and accelerated it. The result? Collapse, starting in 2003 and only worsening from there; as of this post the only significant tabletop RPG companies are Wizards of the Coast (where it's second-fiddle to Magic), Paizo Publishing (weak), and Palladium Books (barely). Every other notable publisher is dead, not really into the scene anymore (which is where Wizards is heading), or reduced to a garage operation.

Meanwhile, the audience originally satisfied by D&D and not served by videogames or boardgames finally has a clear legal avenue to do something about it thanks to the Open Gaming License. This is the legal mechanism that lead to the Old School Renaisance, and its success as a sub-category shows that the real spirit remains in the original edition and its variants. This is true of D&D, and it's also true of other genres.

So what happened?

While the malevolent influence of Williams is hardly insignificant, and the presence SJW infestation is a big problem, neither is sufficient to explain what happened. The change came because of the severing of the connection between the material that inspired the game's original form and the audience that played it, coupled with the failure of Gygax et. al. to communicate how to play the game to an audience that did not share (and thus did not possess) the wargaming norms that informed the Lake Geneva and Minneapolis campaigns that served as test beds for D&D.

The game did away with the domain-based endgame because the succeeding cohorts did not want to play it. They did not want to play it because being a lord in a castle was Game Over to them, and it was Game Over to them because they came from Tolkien and the vast army of imitators (which would soon include TSR's own novel publications) where lords in castles were not the epic heroes they wanted to pretend to be. The wargame aspect fell away for the exact same reason.

As the game became dominated by the rules, the focus narrowed from The Hero and his warband to The Hero alone. (Yes, even in a group of players; teamwork outside of rules-specific interactions became depreciated.) The feedback loop begun in the 1980s only accelerated as the years elapsed and TSR overcommitted into collapse and bankrupcy in the 1990s. The WOTC takeover did not change this. It only cut away the sure losers and refocused on the winning IP amongst its settings.

The dominance of The Hero naturally lead to the takeover of storygaming influences as more and more frustrated novelist types took their frustrations out via running D&D campaigns. As went D&D, so went the tabletop RPG category at-large; some of this bled off into the LARP scene, but not enough to purge the influence, especially as more ties to the videogame industry arose via licenses as well as personnel changes and the networking going on in the Seattle-Tacoma era; PAX only accelerated this trend.

When the OSR arose, it blew up as it did because it found similar conditions to D&D's original success: an underserved audience hungry for the authentic (if virtual) experience of adventure into the unknown, an experience fundamentally favoring adaptation of wargaming as a medium due to the competitive elements to the scenario and the necessity of both logistics and diplomacy in long-term success. The original form was a challenge to players. The current form is wish-fulfillment on an interrupted Pavlovian distribution scheme.

A note on tabletop RPGs going forward is necessary: the failure of D&D's original form to sustain itself was a self-inflicted wound. Apart from the deliberate memory-holing of the fantastic fiction that inspired the game, this iteration of the pattern could have been averted before it started had TSR taken the effort to clearly and consistently communicate what the game is and how to go about playing it- something that did not happen, despite appearances to the contrary.

The reason for the failure is two-fold; lack of awareness that this is necessary, and lack of understanding of what the thing Gary and Dave created actually is. You can't fix what you don't know is broken, and you can't fix a problem that you don't comprehend. Both of these are now solved problems.

Other expressions of the pattern, happening in this one's wake, seem to have picked up on these necessities.

Monday, May 28, 2018

Patterns of Revealed Preference: The Preference For The Authentic

What's going on in tabletop RPG vis-a-vis the OSR-v-D&D/Pathfinder, SF/F in PulpRev-v-PinkSF, and in Retail WOW vs. Classic WOW has interesting parallels. Useful for comparison, and the contrasts reveal interesting tells in how patterns of revealed preference repeat (and are used). So I'm going to spend this week's posts talking about them.

The pattern is this, summarized: A thing hits big in the popular culture of the day, achieving influence far disproportionate to its actual presence. Later successors would fail to comprehend (or willfully misconstrue) why the original succeeded, and in their failure to repeat that success go on to undermine and degrade the original in order to prop up their own increasingly-unstable status.

This accelerates when competition arises that successfully repeats the original. The pattern ends either in the entire category collapsing, or in the corrupt successors repenting and reverting wholly to the original- and abandoning as false the entire idea of "progress" and "progressivism" accordingly.

Each of the areas I mention above are at different points in the expression of the pattern, but they are all expressions of it. (Yes, we can see this in US comics also, which I leave to those who know the US comics industry better than I do.) Each one gets a post over the week to itself, and on Friday I'll bring it back together. Ready for an adventure?

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Sam Hyde Is Right: SJWs Want You Dead & Think It's Funny

Totalbiscuit died of cancer earlier this week, aged 33. He was a big presence in the gaming world, pro-consumer and pro-user, and man did the SJWs not appreciate his even-handed approach during #Gamergate. Why? Because he too wanted ethics in journalism, and had no problem supporting GG to that end. The SJWs never forgave him for that, and it came out in force the hour he died. It's not stopped yet, days later.

The SJWs in gaming cross over media lines, treating tabletop as a fallback position should vidya fail and therefore as a farm league to promote from when possible. This has been a thing for years, especially after the center of the tabletop RPG world shifted from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin to Seattle, Washington (where it's been captured ever since). However, the Upper Midwest remains a place where a lot of tabletop stuff happens so it follows that the farm league exists here also, and that's where Atlas Games lies.

I am not at all surprised to see Cam Banks on that pic. He's a virtue-signalling faggot just like the hambeast that is his wife, and very much a soyboy faggot at that as I witnessed first hand at CONvergence two years ago.

He never had the balls to say to Totalbiscut's face what he said post-mortem while Totalbiscuit lived. Cam's a coward, like all SJWs, and this proves it. Time to find ways to punish this behavior, and that means attacking two things: status and revenue.

The SJW convergence in tabletop RPGs is past "convergence" levels; it is now an active vector for spreading the disease, and all of the major players are complicit (save Palladium) because all of them are converged. Giving money to Wizards of the Coast, Paizo Publishing, Fantasy Flight Games, Catalyst Game Labs, and many others might as well be cutting a check to the DNC. Atlas Games is no different. Buy used, buy from a verified shitlord (e.g. The RPG Pundit), roll your own, or support your local Straw Hat.

That's right, stop being paypigs to people who hate you because these people do hate you. Tabletop RPGs being what they are, you can take their crap and excise the poz at your table, but that misses the point: they still get your money if you buy new from them, so they won't change- they just double-down. Cutting off your custom to them cuts off revenue; getting a critical mass to do so (and this being tabletop RPGs, that's not as hard as it seems) hurts them very hard and very fast.

Then there's the status. Cam's like most SJWs in that his revealed preference by behavior demonstrates his anxiety over, and therefore prizing of, status over all else. He's a failed High Sparrow (hello, Frame Game!), and it shows in his public behavior; run down his status, ramp up his anxiety--fuck his amygdala like a runaway piston--by attacking his rabbit psychology and he'll meltdown as surely as any of his colleges and fellow travelers at Gawker, Polygon, et. al. have done before him.

Skip the Dialetic. He's one of those that can't be reached by it. Get the Rhetoric-Hammer out, tie on the weightstone, and go to town.

And what I said above about him? Applies to every other shitstain above. They're all of a very similar kind, zombie-like, and should be dealt with accordingly. Show no mercy, because he has none for you- none of them do. Break him and be done with it; we may yet find out if he (with or without the hambeast) is also a kid-rapist like so many of his fellows.

Saturday, May 26, 2018

Razorfist: "SO LOW: A Star Wars Box Office"

A film that should have made $170 million dollars this weekend will be fortunate to hit $120 million. I wonder what went wrong?

Told you it would be a shitshow.

The most telling thing was when some folks who went to see it overseas snapped photos of an empty theater, posted them online, and then left about 10 minutes into the film. Unlike when Mouse Wars began, finding so much as a bootleg cam rip of this film will take a little longer due to the lack of global interest in it. It's making money purely in areas where Mouse Wars continues to eat the seed corn that Uncle George left behind when he sold out.

And the knock-on effects are now hitting Disney where they count: real estate projects- parks and hotels. The damage to the brand is starting to threaten related developments intended to exploit the popular sentiment for the brand, and that's a fuck-up that Disney will not overlook. Culty Kathy will get calls from Bob Iger about this (if she hasn't already) because she's fucking up Disney's real business: real estate.

It's looking unlikely that she's got a job past Episode 9. It's also unlikely that the canon will not be revised again after Episode 9; the films will be axed, and even parts of the TV end won't escape. (That time-travel bit in Rebels has to go, at the least.) Kennedy is now proven incompetent, and her SJW bullshit has to go if Disney wants to see the damage redressed and repaired. Dave Filoni can fill in temporarily as a caretaker until a competent leader can be installed and a competent regime with him. (Dave is a creative, and not a leader; you can tell by the difference between Clone Wars and Rebels.)

Death to Mouse Wars. The sooner this abortion is cast off and incinerated, the better.

Side Note: Darth Maul makes an appearance. Folks are going "WTF is this shit?" because they haven't tracked the character through his TV side appearances. Transmedia fails again!

Friday, May 25, 2018

The RPG Pundit: If Every D&D Setting is Like 2018 Seattle it Gets Boring

The RPG Pundit talks about making tabletop RPG settings, and how letting the SJWs shitstains in Seattle do it for you (or let their SJW bullshit inform your own) is only going to lead to a bad time for all.

This comes down to "Stop being a nihilistic post-modernist SJW twat.", and nicely parallels to Jeffro Johnson's push to revive pulp era fiction as the true bedrock for D&D (instead of the post-modernist SJW nihilistc crap commonly claimed).

Listen to what the man's saying: embrace the paradigm that actually existed there and then, have your man act accordingly, and watch the magic happen when things true and faithful to the way things were emergently occur. Use the setting's paradigmatic system that was as it was, and you'll get the results that should have happened.

It requires thinking from a perspective other than your own, something SJWs explicitly reject and exhibit by behavior, which is why SJW RPG settings are shit fit only to be burned and forgotten.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Mouse Wars Fails Again In China

If you've been following the ongoing dumpster fire that is Mouse Wars, then you saw this coming light-years away.

Remember that China doesn't have a generation of nostalgia to burn through. They see things as they are, and act accordingly. Every Mouse Wars film has failed horribly in China to date, and Soylo is no different. It will continue to be like this until the regime changes and the new management turns things around.

And that means Culty Kathy has to go.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

In Case You Missed It: EM-8ER, The Mech v Kaiju Game (Still In Development)

Veteran game developer Mark Kern has had a Mech-v-Kaiju game (Em-8ER) in development for a long time now. This crowd-funded game gets backer updates in a public fashion via video updates as well as via their Discord server. It's not going to be on the shelf for a while yet, but just seeing a videogame go from elevator pitch to complete product is a fascinating process. I'm embedding the video for the other day below so you can see for yourself; links are in the video description.

I like what I see. I just hope I have a computer that can run it when it goes live.

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

The Templin Institute's Second Pilot Season Begins

The Templin Institute's growth remains explosive. They're spending this week pushing pilots for a new programming slot, and the first of them dropped today: a geographic series named "Atlas". If you're not already subscribed to them on YouTube, fix that now because you're missing out. Catch their Twitch streams also, and if you can spare the scratch throw them some sheckles at Patreon.

Monday, May 21, 2018

Revealed Preferences in Gaming: Send In The Clones

If there is anything that MMORPGs and now online virtual tabletop gaming has revealed it is this: most players just make Expies of their favorite characters, and they favor RPGs (regardless of the medium) that facilitate the fulfillment of their Fountain of Expies fantasies.

As the above links show, people clone favorites for the explicit purpose of enjoying them as they desire when the original creator cannot or will not satisfy that urge. RPGs are very good at doing just that, so many do so. (To the point that "Drizzt Clone" is a thing, for an example specific to D&D.)

It's not Mech-Piloting, but it tends to go along with it. The player wants to play his favorite character, so he rolls a clone. This character is an Iconic Hero, and resents all pushes to change the character away from the icon as that negates his reason for playing the character and thus the game. It is this iconic quality that makes it friendly to Mech-Piloting.

While professionals clone for reasons other than satisfying personal desires (sometimes), for gaming this revealed preference shows another truth about the medium: it's about taking a man you dig and seeing if you can do that man better than the creator did. It's why the scenario doesn't matter that much--hence why Muh Storygaming falls flat--because the player desires to prove that he's a better icon than the icon's creator and that requires thinking entirely in terms of competitive gameplay and not Writing Room bullshit.

I can't say that this is bad as such. Folks clone because it's fun to play your favorite characters. The issue is when you go Full Retard about it; you're all there to have fun, so don't harsh on the others' fun by being a dick about it. It's a long-standing revealed preference, so work with it.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

My Life as a Gamer: John Carter is a 9th Level Fighting-Man

The aging Original Gamers will not find the following at all controversial that a given D&D game can go from Tolkien's Middle-Earth to Conan's Hyboria to Burrough's Barsoom without skipping a beat, or without changing so much as how you roll the dice. Today that assertion routinely leads people who really ought to know better that you can't do that because you need to change the rules with every shift.

Horseshit.

That's artifact of Mech Piloting, because it betrays the belief that you can't get shit done without moving some mechanical lever or another. All that is actually required is that the Game Master have sufficient familiarity with the source material to present the environment appropriately and make rulings consistent with the spirit therein. You don't need a rule to handle it; you need a dude to say "No, that's not how it's done here, get over it."

That world-hopping thing I mention above? What I say applies no matter how you take that. It's valid as literal world-hopping during a game, or as metaphorical world-hopping where the same group plays games in each world using the exact same ruleset. While I can do this with D&D's earlier editions, other publishers built business models around this concept (Palladium, HERO).) and all that a Game Master has to do is decide what content is allowed for players use. (A D&D game in Barsoom has no Dwarves, Elves, or Halflings.)

How you roll your man, how your man operates in the environment, combat and recovery, etc.- all the same from game to game and setting to setting. One game can satisfy your gaming needs and wants for the rest of your days if you just let go of the Mech Piloting bullshit- which is why that gets pushed so hard by publishers seeking to exploit that psychology for their commercial benefit. That Game Master is the strength of the tabletop RPG medium; embrace that shit, and the hobby- and let the industry collapse into a pile of ashes and dust.

Saturday, May 19, 2018

The RPG Pundit: "The OSR Is Cutting Edge and Will Change How You Play D&D"

If you've only played a recent D&D edition (including Pathfinder)then you're missing out on an older and richer realm of tabletop RPGs, and Canada's best expatriate cut a video to talk about it. Sure, he shamelessly promotes his own material, but that's not unexpected- he didn't get to where he is by passively waiting for senpai to notice him. He also talks about other people's stuff, and as you're likely unaware that this stuff exists then you'll benefit from watching the video- and then looking up what he talks about at Amazon.

Wizards of the Coast and Paizo Publishing are not the only players in the game, folks. Time to go off the reservation, and the Pundit's good at getting you going, but it can get even more adventurous and I'll talk more about that tomorrow. For now, consider the following: if you use a Basic D&D basis, the amount of rules changes you need to go from Not-Tolkien to Not-Barsoom is ZERO.

That's right. To go from this-

-to this-

-you don't have to change a single rule.

Save your objections. You'll want them for tomorrow's post.

Friday, May 18, 2018

Counterpunching SJWs: Know Them, Know Their Weaknesses

If you're going to get into this fight, then you've got to know your enemy. Yes, having copies of SJWs Always Lie and SJWs Always Double-Down is essential; they're right next to having Sun Tzu's Art of War in importance. But you need to know how shit got this bad, and that means history. QuQu Media did this for the SF/F world in the West last year, but it's still relevant now. We need more such videos, etc. for related fronts.

Knowing your enemy, especially how your enemy got where he is, gives you the intelligence required to make your counterpunching far more effective by being able to target their weakest points with your strongest attacks. As you refine your mastery of Rhetoric--another vital skill you have to have, so get yourself a copy of Aristole's volume of the same name (alone or in compilation with other works by the man; see the link, it's free as of this post)--your rhetorical counterpunches will gain potency due to your habit of hitting where they are weak, provoking spergouts that do damage to their optics where and when it matters most- getting and keeping popular support.

Yes, there are counters to this, such as obfuscating Points of Contact for legal purposes. The SJWs in the Furry fandom are going to find out the hard way that this specific counter isn't effective:

Which should tell you something else about your enemy: most of these SJWs are utter fucking morons, so you only need to worry about the High Sparrows that provide what passes for leadership, as most of these SJWs can be shut down with appalling ease but you still have to counterpunch them.

(Note: I'll get back on the gaming beat tomorrow; this week's emphasis shift was due to an event I could not ignore.)

Thursday, May 17, 2018

Counterpunching SJWs: Be Offensive. B. E. Offensive.

As I got started today, Dragon Award winner and nominee Brian Niemeier reminded me that Michael Z. Williamson is willing to engage in lawfare against the SJWs and those who bend the knee to them.

To the Board of Origins Game Fair,

Greetings. Your decision to remove Larry Correia as an invited Guest, thus eliminating one of your more prominent convention draws,has resulted not only in close scrutiny of your rash and capricious actions, but also a moment in time where you had the choice between accepting the consequences of those actions or committing financial fraud.

Unfortunately, you have apparently chosen the latter. As a business, you promised consumers a chance to meet one of the more prominent authors in science fiction today. You then took their entry money (preorders), uninvited that author (product cancellation), and then refused to issue full refunds to preregistered attendees who no longer had a reason or desire to attend your discriminatory product gala.

Most people, from laypersons to prosecutors and litigation attorneys in between, would view this as a "bait and switch" means of financial fraud.

Moreover, you have doubled down on this apparent fraud and generally rash action in the case of prepaying convention vendors. To those vendors, including my client, Michael Z. Williamson, you not only promised the draw prominent Guests would bring in terms of attendance, you also promised attendees who would be in a mood and an encouraging environment to part with cash for goods.

Instead, by eliminating your convention's most prominent draw(s), drawing stark political litmus test lines as to who is or is not an invited and preferred attendee or Guest, and also by utterly failing to maintain a workable website, you have offered vendors a much lesser (in numbers, buying power, and morale) group of convention attendees. As any number of successful and failed gaming and science fiction conventions have demonstrated, the group of people who insists that Guests pass a political litmus test is not generally the same group that also actually buys things from convention vendors.

Thus, my client is twice the victim of your bait and switch, both as a convention attendee receiving less than a full refund, and as a vendor, who now must not only fight with you to receive a full refund for vendor fees, but must also fill the financial hole left by your late actions, too soon before your convention and too late for my client to attend another, in that same time slot.

For the moment, my client will be satisfied by a full refund of his vendor and attendee fees, including those of family members. I also expect you to issue full refunds to any other cancelling attendees and vendors, though I can not speak for them as their attorney. Given the scope of and motivation for your actions, as publicly expressed by your designated representative, John Ward, in what I can best describe as a series of libelous statements, I have strongly encouraged my client to file a criminal complaint for financial fraud if full refunds are not made.

This statement got followed by a call to others affected by Origins' decision, which you can find here and I recommend you read it.

Yesterday also saw a Darkstream by the Supreme Dark Lord, Vox Day, on the matter. In short? Time to go on offense.

Niemeier concurs on the need to go on offense.

If Origins is refusing to issue refunds to attendees and vendors, then yes, throw the book at them. That doesn't solve the underlying problem, though. Filing antitrust suits against converged companies like WotC and Paizo comes much closer to uprooting the SJW infestation in gaming, since victory in court potentially reduces the amenable authorities gaming SJWs can appeal to.

But I still don't see anyone involved in #ConGate striking at the heart of the problem like Richard Meyer is in the comics industry. Richard is not going after Antarctic Press, who are analogous to Origins in this example. He's filed criminal complaints against Mark Waid, who coerced AP into canceling Richard's publishing deal.

For Larry, Ringo, and M-Zed to respond in kind would mean going after the woman who demanded that Origins drop Larry based on libelous accusations. Nail her to the wall for defamation and tortious interference like Meyer is doing to Waid.

Yes, lawfare is expensive, time-consuming, and uncertain. The situation has observably deteriorated to the point that fighting back against the root cause of the problem requires great expense, considerable opportunity cost, and a degree of personal risk. It would be swell if getting the law involved wasn't necessary, but here we are, because nobody fought back when fighting was easier.

Correct. You start, as I reported yesterday, by immediately (and permanently, preferably) banning the SJWs that pull this shit. You go on from there to file charges against the SJWs concerned, because in some states (like mine) defamation is a criminal offense and that means lawfare consists only of filing that criminal complaints and then letting the State do its job. If not, then it's all well and good to pursue civil damages (and to that end, people will crowdfund your legal affair, so don't be shy about seeking such support).

Here's something to remember: For the SJW, the process is the punishment more often than not. When they went after Count Dankula, they sincerely hoped to imprison him with the hope that the violent inmates would do their wetwork for them, but that would be the bonus; the substance of their own lawfare assault was to use the process itself as the punishment for his wrongthinking. That's why, for all their wailing should a target escape imprisonment, they aren't that put out. Getting to that point is routinely crippling to the target, as it destroys their finances and their employability (yet another reason to attain anti-fragility), gimping the target's ability to fight back thereafter.

Turnabout is fair play.

So go ahead, file those complaints and charges against the SJWs that cause these problems. Make them suffer the process, and don't put too much stock in the hope of seeing them marched off to prison or worse. (Related note: Have no shame in reporting foreign-born offenders to Immigration.) Hit them where it hurts, and they will slink off to softer targets. It's bothersome. It's tedious. It's also necessary. Defense alone just delays your conquest; you have to go on offense to actually win, so gird your loins and do it.

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Counterpunching SJWs: Make Them Feel Pain

I'm passing on two good response options to the present episode of SJW madness.

The first of these comes from author John Ringo, writing at Facebook. The full post you can find here if you wish to comment.

If invited to a con, especially as a 'special guest', require the following in your contract:

  • Pre-paid travel. (Non-refundable, reserved for your use and one guest.)
  • Pre-paid room. (Non-refundable, reserved for your use and one guest.)
  • A cash guarantee of non-cancellation on their part.

Show them links to what happened to myself and Larry.

If they cave to the SJW mobs, make it cost them.

If they refuse, they're probably setting you up. (This, very much, looked like a set-up to boost visibility. ConCarolinas is slightly different.) Tell them that based upon recent history you have to assume they're setting you up if they have issues with such basic items and ask them not to contact you again.

Any convention that for any reason plays this game of 'we have to rescind your invitation' (Origins, ConCarolinas, ArchCon) refuse to attend and ask other authors to refuse to attend. Not for any reason. Not because it's 'local', not because it's 'convenient'. Not because 'I've always gone to X con!'

Start choking them off of the revenue stream created by our attendance.

Just. Say. No.

As authors, we really don't need conventions anymore. You get more sales through posts online and engaging in social media (for as long as Twitter and Facebook will allows us to do so) than going to all the conventions in the world. The cons are mostly for your fans and if the cons want to play this game, the fans need to make it clear they're not going.

As he goes on to say: It's time to strike back. We don't need cons. Cons need us. Time for them to figure that out.

Correct, and the few exceptions Ringo notes are also the more professional and apolitical ones (e.g. DragonCon). Ringo lays out a good counterpunch here, and it's good because it forces the convention to feel real (financial) pain for caving to the SJW Death Cult. While I'm far from such a thing being realistic for me to worry about now, I will remember it and insist upon it when that time comes; the kill fee in particular will be one of my Brown M&M Clauses going forward.

This counterpunch relies on the convention falling victim to the Sunk Cost Fallacy for its effectiveness. They are unlikely to bow to the mob if they have skin in the game--they already paid out, and will pay out more for giving in--especially once they see that the mob won't pay the convention more than they would lose by giving in to them. Not just in the money spent on the author, but also the lost revenue his fans won't give to the convention, so this is real pain and real pain works well in persuasion matters.

Which leads to the other good suggestion, coming from author Michael Z. Williamson. He left a link to this post of his on his blog as a comment to my post of two days ago; having read it, I think it merits mention here due to it being simple, legal, and effective.

Here's the scenario. You're running an event, and on TWITter or Fecesbook, someone calls out a guest and states, "I wouldn't feel safe with this person at the con!"

You must immediately ban this person from the convention.

No, not the guest. The person making the public scene.

Here's why:

This person is arrogating a lot of significance to themselves. The statement assumes that the guest in question either knows this person or will seek them out, and has time allotted for the purpose of interacting with them, any desire to do so, and such interaction must be negative. All of which are almost certainly utterly false assumptions.

For myself, it doesn't matter to me one way or the other how the complainant feels. Their statement alone makes it clear that interacting with such a person is of utterly no interest or consequence to me. I can find much better people to interact with. Actually, let me rephrase that: I can find PEOPLE to interact with.

In fact, they're almost certainly well aware they're perfectly safe, and attempting to drive political opposition into the shadows.

There's a lot more to his post than that. I urge you to follow the aforementioned link and read it in its entirety.

What Michael's talking about is the initiation of a Point-and-Swarm attack, the moment when the target-designator REEEEs.

What you do is call out the REEEing SJW initiating the swarm, and then you drop the banhammer on them. Then you ban every other motherfucking SJW that objects to the first ban, as the violation of their expectations will be so painful to them emotionally that they cannot help but to out themselves as fellow travelers in the Death Cult. Their only goal is to disrupt the event so they can either destroy it or converge it, as per Frame Game Radio's commentary on the Diversity Industry (for which SJWs are the vanguard), following their Marxist predecessors.

Why does this counterpunch work? It stops them from pulling shit before it starts, which is good in itself, and it excludes them thereafter from it entirely If you're already getting the convention to invest in your appearance, as above, getting them to do this to protect that investment isn't going to be that hard to persuade the convention to do thereafter. That emotional pain is very real to SJWs, as their behavior shows when it does occur to them. So use it, early and often, and prevent the poz from taking place.

Make them feel pain and they will flee you for softer targets. Let them howl, so long as they fear you.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Counterpunching SJWs: Tag The Sponsors

Nick Cole ain't having anymore of the bullshit that happened to Larry Correia yesterday or John Ringo last month. He's calling for people to boycott all of the sponsors as well as to let them know in no uncertain terms why they're being boycotted. In short, he's called for Operation Disrespectful Nod to be extended to them.

Good move. This has worked in the past and nothing's changed to diminish its effectiveness now. But it's not enough the Bad Feels dissipate in time and that allows the SJWs to resume their bullshit. Actually doing damage is required.

The same legal options that got used against Mark Waid can be and should be used against every other bad actor, and that means filing charges and complaints- make them go through the process in the legal realm, where their feels are irrelevant. Since these sponsors don't want to deal with the hassle, they'll quickly dial it back to avoid trouble.

Again, be a hard target. SJWs only deal with soft targets; they never go after hard ones. Part of that is making those who prey upon you suffer damage, not just embarrassment. Boycotts are good, but not enough; if they also have to answer to the Feds, then they'll stop being bad just to save their own asses- and without sponsors the SJW-converged events and organizations can't operate, giving more teeth to "Get Woke, Go Broke".

You're customers before fans, folks. Act like it.

Monday, May 14, 2018

File Charges or Fuck Off: How to Counterpunch SJWs

Dragon Award winner Brian Niemeier wrote a great post today over at his blog regarding the #ComicsGate issue regarding Jawbreakers and the efforts of the SJWs in American comics to deplatform the creators and prevent its publication. Go over there and read this, because what I have to say follows on from that.

When this jumped off, I advised Diversity & Comics (the lead for this project) to collect everything he knows and report Waid and the others to the Federal Trade Commission. Why? Because, as Oliver Campbell said years ago when #GamerGate jumped off, the fastest way to de-fang a SJW point-and-swarm attack AND simultaneously punish them for doing so is to take this out of the Realm of Feels and into the Realm of Reals- and that means a Court of Law. It's how Gawker went down like the Hindenberg.

Suing isn't necessary. You go straight to criminal proceedings, and let the State handle the matter. At most you want a lawyer to push for a judge to block the SJWs from fucking with you further while the process plays out. But too many folks like Antarctic Press did nothing, instead of just filing a criminal complaint and letting the State do the job it claims for its legitimacy.

That changed today.

Waid, YOU DUN GOOFED! You also dragged Marvel into this, and the other SJWs haven't seen fit to take notice of how serious the situation is now. I would hope that Richard Meyer goes on to collect all of the libel and slander levied at him and files criminal complaints in every applicable jurisdiction where it is a criminal offense- and then sue where it's not. Take them all to court and make them face facts there, where their SJW bullshit does not apply and will not work.

And I say "Use the legal system" because it's where the game doesn't favor SJWs. Facts matter there. Counterpunch hard, folks. They won't fuck with you if they fear you, much like how you never see SJWs go after someone like Pablo Escobar or El Chapo. Be a hard target and they won't come at you.

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Mother's Day Podcasts You'll Likely Enjoy

The folks at SuperversiveSF did a Mother's Day livestream. I thought it was nice, so I'm embedding it below. Happy Mother's Day.

And don't forget that the Metro City Boys will be live tonight. Catch it if you can at their channel.

Saturday, May 12, 2018

Geek Gab Talks Jordan Peterson, Diversity & Comics and more w/ Jim Fear

Today's Geek Gab featured Jim Fear and talked Jordan Peterson, Diversity & Comics, the continuing collapse of the Big Two in comics, and more. There's nothing on, so queue it up and have a good time- including we who were in the live chat, since Chat Replay is now a thing.

BONUS UPDATE!

The schedule for this year's slate of E3 presentations is up, and I'm posting it below:

If that's not big enough for your eyes, embiggen here

Friday, May 11, 2018

Inappropriate Characters: A New Gaming Podcast Debuts

It's time to give another podcast a boost. I'll let one of the hosts do the hype:

The inaugural - and thus most amateurish - episode of Inappropriate Characters! The RPG Pundit, Venger Satanis and Grim Jim invite you to listen in as we discuss issues in and around the tabletop gaming world.

Well, that's good enough for me to give it a shot. If tabletop RPGs are your jam, here you go. Good luck to the trio and may your show hit like the fist of an angry god.

Thursday, May 10, 2018

Comic Relief: The Truth About #Gamergate (Dun! Dun! DUN!)

Sometimes you find something so absurd that you have to laugh. Today it's this parody of some of the dumbest shit to come out of Crazytown. Behold, veterans of the Great Meme War and many others: The Influence Map of Gamergate!

You have to get in there and look close-up to see the giveaways that this is parody, but the worst part is that you know some SJW somewhere has something like this waiting to be posted to Tumblr or something with the earnest seriousness of a David Icke while ranting like Alex Jones in the name of Literally Who (and it will likely be done by Literally Wu).

Go on, folks. You know you want to meme the shit out of this map. Go for it. Do the best damned sendup of Ancient Aliens that you can. This is the best opportunity to mock the crap out of the SocJus Death Cult we've had since Tuesday, so go for it. Bonus points if you get the Fake Journos and Fake Diversity crowd to buy this as true.

Praise Kek, and Shadilay My Dudes. Go forth and milk these LOLcows dry.

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

Cultural Cowardice In Action: The Face-Heel Turn of the Holy Light in Warcraft

The writing for World of Warcraft is not known for being good, but there's mediocre and then there's Shit You Expect Out of SJW Writing Programs. This is the latter. It concerns the Scenario that a Horde player undergoes once he attains the opportunity to recruit the Mag'har Orcs of Draenor (as in Warlords of Draenor) formally into the Horde.

In an attempt to maintain some continuity with the worst expansion in the game's history to date, the Scenario presents the player with a timeskip of some 20-30 years (when, in game time, it's been only two or so since the end of said expansion's events) because Timey-Whimey bullshit, and now the Draenei girl you rescued from the Iron Horde--Y'rel, a.k.a. Joan of Draenor--has become The Prophetess and leads her legions of Lightbound against the Orcs in a war of conquest and subjugation akin to that of the early wars of Islam.

Blah, blah, blah. You defeat the attack and that leads to the Mag'har sending warriors to fight in Azeroth because it's less stupid a scenario than this one. Congratulations, you may now roll a Mag'har Orc as a Horde Allied Race (and play one of the worst races in the game; all that stupid bitchwork for weak-assed orcs), so the disappointment gets worse once you see how bad they are.

This stupid scenario got its setup with a sudden Face-Heel Turn for a specific Naaru (giant living crystal demigod), the Prime Naaru Xe'ra, when the Argus patch dropped and Edgelord Illidan refused Xe'ra's offer to be reborn as Lightforged "because I am my scars" and instead killed the not-angel. Illidan would go on to become the jailer for the Supreme Edgelord Sargaras (the Satan figure, to date) when the player would participate in defeating Sargy and his Burning Legion in their own HQ.

Yep, we suddenly got "Light Is Not Good" force-fed as the Correct Position instead of a possible misinterpretation (Scarlet Crusade) the devs as a culture can't avoid what is otherwise implied by their Totally Not Christianity cosmological roots for the Holy Light; it's a reflexive subversion and they carried it forward here. It's stupid and wrong, and the devs should feel stupid and wrong for signing off on it.

It's another in a stream of disappointing developments for Battle For Azeroth, and while most of them involve gameplay one should not disdain the aesthetics- and this qualifies as another unforced error that will push people away where other errors did not. Why? Because this entire shift on the Holy Light is cultural cowardice made manifest; a courageous company would've owned up to the implications, wore them as armor, and committed to them. That would make for something interesting to engage with. This? Relativist cop-out cowardice. Boring, weak, and lame.

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Alex Becker: Sink "Solo" To Save Star Wars

The World Class Bullshitters aren't the only ones making the case that Mouse Wars is a dumpster fire unworthy of your support.

This is Alex Becker. His normal beat is financial and business related. He's also a Star Wars fan. He's been on this for a while, but I'm posting this video because he puts in 17 minutes why Solo has to bomb for the franchise to recover- and rightly juxtaposes the failure of Star Wars vs. the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Five solid reasons in just over 15 minutes, chief being the utter incompetence of Lucasfilm CEO Kathleen Kennedy as the cause for all of the problems (and compared against Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige, who's leadership and competence directly led to the massive hit that is Infinity War).

Don't give money to those who hate you. Don't be a PayPig. Paypigs are losers.

Monday, May 7, 2018

The Coming Collapse of Dr. Jordan Peterson

Last week, the Supreme Dark Lord Vox Day turned his baleful gaze upon Dr. Jordan Peterson. He wasn't keen to do so, until enough people told him what Peterson pushed to pique his interest, at which point the full power of his intellect got brought to bear on the man and his work.

It's not over just yet, and it's not looking good for Peterson.

You can see this take place on his blog, starting here. There is an accompanying Darkstream video, which I'll embed below.

I urge you to read all of the follow-up posts, and watch the follow-up Darkstream videos, to see how Vox Day's inquiry into the man progresses from curiosity to condemnation. Why? Because it will make both today's Darkstream and today's appearance on Alex Jones far easier to see in their proper context.

Vox Day won't be the direct cause of Peterson's collapse. However, by talking about this in his own outlets and appearing on friendly ones like InfoWars, he's handing to those that will break Peterson the techniques and tools necessary to make it happen. Some folks who already can make use of such things showed that they're ready and willing to do so (such as Alex Jones), and more will do so soon. Once Vox's conclusions, and how he got there, disseminate widely then the rhetoric will come and Peterson is done.

Why?

Because Vox Day is right almost as often as /pol/ is, and /pol/ is always right. Peterson's collapse will be brutal.

Sunday, May 6, 2018

A Double-Dose of Pop-Culture Podcasts: Geek Gab & SuperversiveSF

Yesterday the Geek Gab crew had a good one-hour show focusing on Infinity War, and today the SuperversiveSF crew talk both that film and Galaxy's Edge. It's Sunday, so here's your afternoon of podcast entertainment to hold you over until the dinner hour.

Saturday, May 5, 2018

The Fate of the LOLCow: The Collapse of @ThomasWictor

Some time ago, Thomas Wictor appeared on my Twitter feed. This old man came out of nowhere to opine on Trump, Syria, and the Saudis. His long, rambling threads reminded me of this old Animaniacs bit.

The thing that kept happening was that his claims on the Saudis kept panning out, ultimately. I heard about the drive to oust the ISIS types before it happened. The same with the loosening on the culture (most recent payoff there being talks with the Vatican to build churches in the country), and the constant use of deception at the operational level. He talked about North Korea coming to the table months before it happened. So, even if he was wrong in some areas he jived enough with other sources (Q in this case) that I'd keep him around.

But he had another curious pattern. Whenever challenged on his claims, he'd take personal offense (as shown by his behavior), get petty like some aging diva throwing a fit over a gossip rag, and come up with this ridiculous tirades, and act like he'd uncovered a Horrible Thing That Must Be Dealt With Because Crazy. That was my first indication that Wictor was not wholly reliable, so my estimation of him dropped down to where I put David Icke: entertaining, but not trusted.

This sort of thing happened a few more times. The entire "Smartest Guy In The Room" act, complete with freakouts when challenged, followed by another curious tell: as soon as he seemed to have a real threat, he'd declare victory while claiming ridiculous levels of people he blocked. By now he attracted a posse of hangarounds who mirrored his gimmick, and the mutually-reinforcing behavior started, and now I began to recognize this as an issue.

By this point he'd gone on to talk multiple times on his own mental health issues, and his background in journalism.

Friday, May 4, 2018

World Class Bullshitters: Star Wars - The B-List Property

"This week we cover the colossal success of The Avengers and the embarrassment that is Star Wars."

If Jim Fear shows you that you can have a good influence on the culture with a one-man band podcast, then the World Class Bullshitters show you what a small, dedicated crew focused on a mission can do- and in rather short time. They've been at this for just a couple years of weekly podcasts, and now they're shaping pop culture narratives.

No, I'm not kidding. These goofs are actually having a real impact that's counter-acting the stupid amounts of money spent on PR by Mouse Wars, Fake Trek, and many other SJW-converged pop culture franchises. They can, and should, take credit for spreading the word on how back The Last Jedi was before it went into its first weekend. They broke wide the utter failure of Mouse Wars merch rotting on the shelves. They didn't even try, and they got some other fan channels to out themselves as Mouse Wars shills.

And their success emboldened others to go this route, to varying success.

They're being what they want to see, and what they want to see is pure fan love with an utter intolerance for bullshit and crap. The takeaway? Be what you want to see, own that, and waive that proud and loud on your flag flown high. The Bullshitters paved the way for a more love-focused engagement with the stuff we love, something not nihilistic like Plinkett (Red Letter Media) is at heart or selling out for trinkets and head-pats from Culty Kathy.

And that's our highlights for the week.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

Highlight: The Jim Fear Podcast

Want a good one-man-band podcast that hits the sweet spot? Then put Jim Fear in your blogroll or feed or whatever and watch for him to put out another episode.

You cannot get more fundamental in Being The Culture than seeing one man run his own show. He calls the shots. He records, uploads, and spreads the word as best he can with what he's got. No bullshit, no corporate meddling, no PR people leaning on him to bend this way or that- just Jim, just as he is.

If he can do it, then so can you. Take the very fact that he has a podcast as proof of concept that you too can contribute your bit- and those bits do add up over time as well as in concert with others of similar mind. He's being what he wants to see.

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Highlight: The Templin Institute

As with Spacedock, I've recommended The Templin Institute before. What I said regarding Spacedock applies to the Institute; they're in it to Make Science Fiction Fun Again. They do this with videos like this one on the province of Skyrim, and since I last posted about this outlet they too have expanded into Twitch streaming and are getting into more projects- they're in a strong growth phase as of this post.

This is a valid way to engage and change the culture: focus on doing that which you find to be fun, and do so to entertain others that share your interests, and you will uplift it by force of personality over time. Adhering to this course requires a commitment to a positive presence, and fun positivity is always going to find and retain an organic audience: this is the sensibility people crave.

Yeah, that's right, they're of a similar sensibility to the #PulpRev: a focus on fun, entertaining content meant to satisfy an underserved audience craving that fundamental function of culture. They are apolitical in their presentations, and that's okay; we go to the Institute to have fun geeking out over fictional things, not to throw down about real politics like it's Tuesdays at Tony's so we brawl in the parking lot.

And geeky fun is good for the culture. Support the Institute.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Highlight: Spacedock

I'm going to highlight a few outlets this week that are going the positive route in doing something about the culture.

Spacedock is a channel I previously recommended. I stand by that. Daniel's channel is all about being the culture he wants to see, and he does it with enthusiasm.

I have yet to be disappointed by any Spacedock video. Sure, he's apolitical, but that's his strength. He wants to entertain and inform, not lecture or propagandize, and that's why I like this channel and recommend it to others. When he does paid promotion, he discloses that upfront, so he's more ethical than most fan media journalists right there. Stay on that beat and you can't go wrong- something a lot of bigger media outfits routinely screw up.

This is as Joe Friday as it gets without aping that character outright, and this simple fact-focused approach works very well, something that I'll talk a but more about tomorrow with another highlighted outlet.

I expect that most of you now are subscribed to Spacedock, but if you haven't then do so and enjoy all he has to offer. He has an admitted blind spot for anime, so when he asks for recommendations be ready to give him the good stuff; see his video on Cowboy Bebop's spacecraft for how a fresh set of eyes can bring out some good observations. He's also expanded to do more groundside vehicles, and so on, as of late. Follow his Twitch channel; he livestreams now.