The Culture: Basic Logic Makes Commies Its Bitch

Boldest channel on YouTube these days.

Keep digging into his backlog. He's got one banger after another.

The Culture: Tex Teases Hesperus II Episode

This dropped recently. Looking forward to the full episode.

And remember, the next 'Mech video on deck is The Archer.

The Culture: Tabletop Makers Need To Work Harder To Justify Their Existences

I am thinking of something that should be talked about.

Put away the Theater Kid faggotry and its performative signalling. Put away Braunstein. Put away the Cargo Cult and its stupid norms.

Think like a Normie that isn't in the hobby, but only sees it as the precursor to the Vidya versions. Specifically, think of the single-player adventure game where you control one man, doing things by himself without superpowers or items that emulate those effects. In short, your classic Fighting Man (or a boy growing into one); this is the sort of tale you see in the old days, almost all of which are in the Public Domain now.

What does that game look like?

"That's-"

No, not really. You're not looking at easily scaling things up from man-to-man to mass combat and this isn't a musou so he ain't a one-man army either; if he's facing two on one, he's in trouble, especially if they just pile on like it does in real life- and that's just other men. Monsters can easily be too much to handle even if it's just one of them.

"GURPS?"

No, not really; it, and HERO, are Dev Kit products. They are not games. They are tools to develop ideas into games.

You're looking at a ruleset that gets into the weeds a bit. Like Palladium, this is a circumstance where blow-by-blow matters. Like Traveller, this is a circumstances where you taking a hit is a serious problem. Your Pace of Decision is at the Second level, not the Minute or greater level, because the level of abstraction you're after here is one where what you wear, where your gear it, how hurt/hungry/thirsty/tired you are matters, and all of that factors into your man's performance. This is a level of abstraction that--normally--is anti-thetical to good, satisfying, or proper gameplay.

Yet few products that attempt to get this close to the single man perspective try to be readable technical manuals that Normies can read, comprehend, process, and apply in minutes and in small amounts as required. (Rolemaster being a particular offender here.)

If you're going to insist on publishing adventure game products, the least you can do is justify your existence by getting away from the space utterly consumed by D&D and its Network Effect as well as those already occupied by products/brands with similar status (e.g. HERO, Call of Cthlulhu, Traveller, BattleTech, RIFTS).

You lot need to sit down and think through what justifies your product being independent of those Networks and their Brands. Me doing this think-aloud piece above is that sort of work, because none of them do it well and few of them even comprehend the question- nevermind try to answer it.

Try to answer the question above: "What does the adventure game focused on one adventurer, with no powers, look like?"

Right now, it looks more like Sword World (and that's still a far cry from the answer) than anything else. You need to carve out the niche you claim to champion BECAUSE IT DOES NOT EXIST!

The Business: You Still Aren't Escaping The Bots

Your reminder to not discount Super Intelligence in media production. This is a foreigner with a YouTube channel and access to several models.

Quoting the (translated) description:

"Original Sci-Fi Animation Project: *Space Battleship: Cyclops* – Concept Film.

This concept film was created to bring to life the world and story of an original sci-fi work set in deep space. It is not the main series itself, but rather a production designed to explore the project's world-building, visual style, and narrative potential.

Audio: Japanese | Subtitles: English | Opening Theme: "Zankou no Kanata" (Beyond the Afterglow) | Artist: TR1AD | Planning & Production: Taisho Shin.

*Note: Generative AI was used in a portion of the video production process; however, the project—including planning, composition, direction, and editing—was crafted as a cohesive original video work. © Taisho Shin.

Is there some jank? Yep. Still there. Given the consistency of his character and vehicle designs, I expect that those were generated seperately and then reused as references for the composite shots. Voices were nothing I hadn't heard before; machine translation likely used for generating the subtitles too, explaining some of the tonal oddity in the dialog.

And this guy's an Anglophone who did a pilot.

This is what you can currently do.

Also janky, but you can tell this is already comparable with what the studios in Japan pump out season on season; it's already on the verge of making that business case of cheap and fast animation obsolete and forcing those studios back into higher-end work that takes longer due to quality control to continue justifying their existences, much like the OVA boom did decades ago.

Yet here one guy has a complete pitch for a series or film. The other has a pilot. Not some storyboards. Not a manga chapter. Not some concept pieces and a summary of a light novel or webcomcs. A fully animated pitch trailer or pilot episode, ready for throwing at studios, who can then take what he likely has as his production bible and then immediately accelerate to series or film production.

This, right here, demonstrates at least months and likely years of saved production time purely by showing the prospective production committee what the finish work looks like- and those designs are so friendly to merchandising that you know they'd sell if the full series/film is good and satisfies its audience.

You will have to reckon with this totally wrecking the established film/TV/animation industry within a decade, such that the only alternative that will be viable will be considered "artisinal" and thus solely at the sufferance of patronage to finance their production because it's already this good and only getting better. Expect SI to get incorporated into commercial animation workflows deeply at all stages within a few years, and from there what's already happening in books, comics, and games will come in full force for film and TV.

The Culture: We Get New VOTOMS Before GTA 6

Well folks, looks like we're going to be eating good for a while since Hathaway's Flash started a trend in seinan mecha revivals.

Yeah, another female protagonist, but let's seen if this one's a Sue before burning her at the stake. This is a Mamoru Oshi picture, under supervision from the original series' director, so I'm inclined to give it a chance.

And let's be fair about the setting: both states in VOTOMS would not hesitate to throw disagreeable women to the meatgrinder as a form of social control. This is still the Realist of Real Robot mecha, and that includes the sheer amount of Grimdark Fuckery that the powerful get up to. Remember Fyana's position vis-a-vis Chirico is as his distaff counterpart and thus is also prone to being toss into deep shit for various fuckery-related reasons. This looks to be more of the same.

The Business: Dear God, A Glitter Boy Supplement

Uncle Kevin's still making RIFTS books.

TLDR:

It’s time to suit up — the Glitter Boy Codex is coming soon!

This is the first Rifts sourcebook dedicated to the most recognizable power armor in the Megaverse. 128 pages of pure Glitter Boy glory: history, variants, factions, legendary suits, tech — the kind of high-stakes Mega-Damage mayhem only Palladium can deliver.

Whether you’re a wandering Glitter Boy hero, a mercenary pilot living the dream, or a Game Master who wants to drop a chromium legend on your table, this book is for you.

This is being crowdfunded, but the campaign isn't live as of this post.

The Culture: Meet The Wolheim Witch

If you've read JD Cowan's The Last Fanatics, this is independent confirmation.

BTW - here's the poison apple that planted the Upas tree behind "Modern Traditional Publishing" - Betsy Wollheimhttps://t.co/TrqYpUC4cchttps://t.co/KlDS4ds0kJ

Two parts of a fluff article given to her on BlackGate which is the voice of these people - who celebrated the… pic.twitter.com/e5dzCoj9NK

— Maxx Feral (@MaxxFeral) September 24, 2026

Betty Wolheim carried on her father's work, in spirit if nothing else; she's a second generation Fanatic.

She was part of the cohort that began moving into power in the industry in the 1970s, reaching critical mass in the 1990s and seizing power openly from 2000 forward. You can find her successors in the Longhousing of all culture. She was a witch. Her succcessors are witches. Do what is required to deal with this.

Because otherwise this shit keeps happening.

The Culture: The Gundam Base Will Come To Minnesota

I did not expect this, but welcome it all the same even if it was delayed from its original launch date of today.

OPENING DATE UPDATE

We have an important update for fans. The opening of Bandai Namco Cross Store Minneapolis, MN and THE GUNDAM BASE Minneapolis at Mall of America has been postponed from its originally scheduled September 30 opening date.

We deeply apologize for any… pic.twitter.com/tS0Q3sKnli

— Bandai Namco Amusement America (@BandaiNamcoAM) September 26, 2026

My birthday is a week from today. If it's open by then, I'll try to get there. If not, as soon as it's open. This is enough for me to risk a trip to the Mall of America.

The Business: Network Effect Convergence In Action

The shill channels are cutting videos on the new WOW tie-in book for Official Edition.

Told you that this was a defacto merger strat. Now you're seeing it in action.

You can expect more of this when the Mouse Wars book hits.

The Networks are merging.

The end goal is that THERE IS ONE ENTERTAINMENT MONOCULTURE where all IP engagement is corpo-controlled across ALL media.

People refuse to look past their own noses, so I won't be surprised to see people being unable to comprehend this being the objective, but it is.

WOW Forever pioneeers official controller support for the MMO. That can be done with a Steam Deck, which means it's a half-step away from being playable on mobile.

Tabletop, via Official Edition, is also moving to being playable on mobile.

The mobile app for Official Edition is a few years away. The merging of the two games into a single property briding over multiple media is even further away, but it is now clearly on the table; Fortnite paved the way, and this is the next step in that same business model.

I underestimated how bad the commercial side of the cataclysm that came upon the Cargo Cult is, and how devastating this damage shall shake out to be.

The Business: Welcome Back, Leeroy

This is a good sign for the official Classic Plus realm.

LETS DO THIS

LEEROY JENKINS pic.twitter.com/wLNvEfebme

— Leeroy Jenkins (@leeroyjenkinsol) September 19, 2026

The legend returns. This man couldn't be bothered to stay with Retail all this time, and he wasn't around much for the Classic releases, but here he is now for this.

Yes, the memes flowed.

But if someone who, now middle-aged, is willing to come back into the public sphere then there's sufficient enthusiasm to carry the launch forward into the long-tail business model that Blizzard promised.

Reports out of the Beta confirm that this edition of the game is sufficiently changed to make this no-FOMO, no-GOGOGO play paradigm practical and achievable. Explicit shutdowns of whines by Retail Andys about things in the Classic vein, coupled with implementation of systems that guarantee economic stability via strong gold sinks (Black Market Auction House) and solid price ceilings (vendors selling rare materials at a fixed gold cost, making it impossible to corner the market on them to jack up the price- no more Devilsaur Mafia bullshit).

I am impressed with what's there so far. I even think Air Elves are going to be fine, especially if they do tie them into the Thunderfury story somehow.

WOW 2 is here.

The Culture: Death To The Prussian Schooling Scam

I'll put up a longer thinkpiece on this video at another time, but for now know that the woman who exposed Lester Del Ray as the man who made "Fantasy" a thing has a new (and very good) video- especially if you have children or grand-children under your care.

I may narrow this down into something for gaming in particular, since there is so much remedial work that needs to be done.

Do note that other language cultures have works of similar seminal status; if you're in or of that world, adjust the plan proffered above accordingly.

The Culture: More Professional Wargaming Is Good

Did not expect this, but I should have.

"With this federal grant, faculty plan to weave wargaming more deeply into the intelligence curriculum, allowing cadets to encounter simulations throughout their four years rather than only near the end of their studies." https://today.citadel.edu/learning-how-to-lead-under-pressure-and-in-a-crisis-new-250k-federal-grant-expands-wargaming-at-the-citadel/

- Wargaming Weekly

Read on Substack

It's not like the beneficial effects of professional wargaming are not known.

What is not known is that there remains a relationship between Professional and Hobbyist wargaming. The dysfunction of one side is mirrored in the other.

"Anecdotally, after interacting with new game designers, the greatest difficulty is the equivalent of "writer's block". Getting started from a blank piece of paper or empty whiteboard is a significant challenge. An effective method to overcome this initial blockage, kickstart the creative process, and inject the art into the wargame is by way of the Red Team." https://www.mors.org/publications/phalanx

- Wargaming Weekly

Read on Substack

What I've seen by observation is that, while it is not flashy or fast-acting, you are far more likely to get effective and lasting (if not permanent) results by working indirectly and doing things via manipulation of Second Order Effects. A lot of the faggotry and stupidity we see in the commercial and hobbyist sphere can be, and will be, solved by fixing the professional side and thus creating the incentives and pressures that will make the commercial and hobbyist spheres get back in line.

The Culture: Castalia Publishes The Most Popular Three Kingdoms Version In English

Castalia House continues to innovate.

In this case with machine-aided translation work, making it far easier and thus cheaper to translate non-Anglophone literature into English (and vice-versa).

In the last week, one of the biggest such projects hit the stands: fff

THE EPIC RETELLING OF A CHINESE CLASSIC

Yoshikawa Eiji's Sangokushi is the most widely read retelling of the Three Kingdoms saga ever written. Serialized from 1939 to 1943 in the Chūgai Shōgyō Shinpō newspaper, it was read by tens of millions and has remained continuously in print for over eighty years. Where the original Chinese Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a historical chronicle, Yoshikawa reimagined it as a living novel: his Liu Bei is not a symbol of virtue but a complicated man struggling with ambition and doubt, his Cao Cao is brilliant and terrifying in equal measure, and his Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are as vivid as any characters in modern fiction. It is through Yoshikawa, more than through any other writer, that East Asia's greatest epic entered the mainstream of modern Japanese culture and, from there, inspired the manga, anime, films, and video games that have carried the Three Kingdoms story around the world.

The Peach Garden begins in the last days of the decaying Han Dynasty, when the empire is rotting from within and peasant rebellions are consuming the provinces. In a marketplace, a straw-sandal weaver named Liu Bei meets a fugitive butcher named Zhang Fei, and shortly after, a warrior named Guan Yu who is on the run for killing a corrupt official. The three men swear an oath of brotherhood in a peach garden to live and die together, and to restore justice to the realm, then set out with nothing but their pledge and their weapons to make a place for themselves in a world that is coming apart. From that oath, everything follows: the rise of warlords, the burning of cities, and the first stirrings of the war that will tear China into three kingdoms.

This original Castalia House translation is the first volume of a complete English translation of all ten volumes of Yoshikawa's Sangokushi.

Currently available only in Kindle, you can expect a print version to become available at a later date- thought you may want to subscribe to Castalia's newsletter to ensure that you get told when it happens instead of relying on Amazon.

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: 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 Culture: We Can Freeze Them Out

Last Thursday Chubby Funster cut this video on the new Vampire edition.

Aside from dumping the offenders face-down in a ditch or giving them one-way trips to the Titanic, there are ways to gatekeep.

The first, and most obvious, is to (a) stay within the Network by (b) either using a previous edition or (c) putting our your own fork and filtering out those who do not- and making acquiring copies of that edition piss-easy to do. You are competing on pre-existing presence being your means of lowering friction. If your edition is easy to acquire and use than the new crap, you seize control of the Network and now YOU control what Is and what Is Not.

This is how you win: make your edition less frictive than theirs, take the high ground, seize control (and thus the gates), then freeze them out.

The Business: Another Axanar Arrived

We have another Axanar situation.

The man behind Star Wars Theory put out a fan film that clowned on the Devil Mouse.

I am not exaggerating; compare this to what we saw out of D23 for the new season of Ahsoka and you can see that it does make Disney look poor by comparison. SWT isn't the Axanar gang; he doesn't have professional actors, costuming, practical sets, etc. and the expense that goes with it. He's made a CG fan film, but he did it right and thus it puts to mind the trailers for SWTOR that Blur did years ago- trailers that also clowned on the official live-action media.

This is what is coming.

No, Disney can't stop this- try as they might. The savvy will just lie about it, then upload it from jurisdictions that tell Disney's lawyers to pound sand to ensure that once up it stays up (even if you may need a VPN to access it).

"But Muh Copyright!" stops meaning anything when you have a global Internet and several countries that are more than happy to host this stuff Because Reasons. Couple that with the ready availability of hardware to burn things to disc, flash drives being cheaper than batteries, and all other forms of DIY distribution being available (including Torrents and FTP servers) and you have the conditions for the long-awaited Fan Coup.

Network Effects are real. Fighting within them matters. This? This demonstrates Proof Of Concept, and with it comes the test of what defines Uncle George's Space Opera now that Uncle George has abandoned his creation. You can argue that this should be spent on original creations, but then I must respond with the Enemy's words: "No one will watch it."

The people want the Brand. Now the tools are here for the people to make their own Brand media, and they will with increasing skill and frequency henceforth. Revealed Preferences are Revealed.

The Culture: You Can't Reason With Those That Kill You When They Can

Vee dropped a reminder to us all on Sunday last weekend.

Normies run off vibes. They are the low-T men and women of the meme.

And we know that Commies Always Lie, thus fulfilling two other memes.

Thus do Commies always run off vibe-fuckery to get and keep power. They are a Christian Heresy based on Envy and Resentment, run by Elite-class cohorts that are on the outs and with dim prospects for fulfilling their class ambitions otherwise- same as it ever was.

They are your enemy. They hate you and want you dead. They hate God and side with the Enemy. They made their choice. Give them their just reward: flame and fire.

The Business: A Reminder That Vidya Does Cargo Cult (Non-)Gaming Better Than Them For Less

Vidya continues to make the Cargo Cultist offering look as bad as it is.

Light No Fire in particular is a threat to Temu D&D and even to Official D&D because you have a Domain Game.

Better than others like it (Valheim, Enshrouded, Pax Dei, etc.), this threatens the Cargo Cult in particular because of--you guessed it--reduced friction compared to Cargo Cult play and it being full of fake and gay lameness.

Want to play solo? You can. Want to get the boys together? You can. Build up your own domain? You can.

Lots of what makes Vidya in general a superior alternative to Official D&D and Cargo Cultist knockoffs is here, is refined, and is going to be far easier to acquire and play (and get others to play with you) at a cheaper price compared to Cargo Cult non-gaming.

Unlimited L Works, Cargo Cultists. All the Ls. All for you. All the time.