Different costums. Different set dressing. Exact same story, BEAT FOR BEAT.
Yet they will tell you that these are three separate genres. That can only one of two things; either those specific genres are fake, or the very concept of "genre" is nothing more than a product label the same that you put books separate from shoes separate from toothpaste.
What this is, consistently, is a Drama. That's the substance--the narrative structure--that defines what a story is; too many professionals and wanna-bees mean "product category" when they say "genre" and that's how publishers, distributors, developers--all the business types--see this topic, and they always have.
Too many creatives--such as John Truby--confuse "product label" with "narrative structure" when they say "genre"; if you doubt this, get your library card out and go read Truby's book on Genre.
We see how fake "genre" is again with Appendix N, where Adventure Fiction is split between two equally fake genres: "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction".
"Horror" is also a fake genre.
If they are not real, what are they? The lead in Kristen McTiernan's latest interview makes this plain: Audience Expectation Templates-cum-Product Categories.
And in Tabletop, we have two well-known Brands that prove how fake genre is: TORG and RIFTS. (There are others, but these are go-to.)
It's all the same thing. For us, it's all Fantastic Adventure. That's what we do; the rest is just varations of costumes and set dressing, as the substance--the strucutre--is always exactly the same.
Which is why well over 99% of all Tabletop products can't justify their existence, are surplus to requirements, and and thus have no right to exist and must be abolished.
It feels like just yesterday I was giggling at ChatGPT's goofy attempts to make Magic card mechanics. Now ChatGPT can design a 110-page RPG from scratch and playtest it with simulated players. How long until it can just one-shot a 1,500-page rule set like ACKS? https://t.co/359tqRlarSpic.twitter.com/dxFmOt5Yjh
We can bring harnesses and apps and models together another way as well. I asked Codex to create an entirely new tabletop roleplaying game, basically its own version of Dungeons and Dragons in a fantasy world of its own invention, full of all of the tables and rules you need to play. I also asked it to simulate players experiencing the game and revise the rules based on what it found.
The article where this process gets explained is here.
I'm not going to say that the game is good. Nor am I going to say that it's worth engaging. What this is, however, is PROOF OF CONCEPT.
From Idea to Product in minutes; this is what Wizards of the Coast will use to maintain dominance over the commercial side of the hobby, both for any in-house work and especially to oversee any third party works going forward- it is trivially easy to take the licensor's manuscript, filter it through the Brand Fit filter as a rewrite, and then do some spot-checks before letting it go live on Beyond.
That linked paper comments on what needs to be considered.
In addition to being technically neat, there is a lot to like about the actual content. The setting is interesting and novel, and the rules appear to make sense, drawing on existing game patterns while adding unique elements. However, a closer inspection also reveals the jagged frontier of AI ability is not entirely gone. Every generation of AI models has struggled with actually building long-form fiction. If you are a frequent reader of AI writing you see the same problems here: a love of the uncanny; overly complex ideas that do not fully pay off; weird metaphors (“weather and architecture are the same argument at different speeds”); too many ornate sentences (“the holy things that surface when a sea forgets it was once a road,” is cool once, an entire book of that is exhausting); dialogue where every character speaks in the same clipped tone; and the name “Mara.” So, even amongst all the amazing technical progress, there are still rough edges.
Holdouts are going to lose hard and fast now that it's shown that a professional-quality product can be made by one man in the fraction of the time it formerly did. Remember that Revealed Preferences are Revealed; people only care about the result, not about how that came about- claims to the contrary are not supported by the action that matters. This will lift the floor of what is considered Acceptable Output in all hobby publications, commercial or hobbyist, because the means to do so are now in the hands of common men who need only to learn how to use their words to make the machine do as they will.
This is not just about Tabletop. This is about all forms of media production. The folks crying about it are already being rooked by those that use the tools, making "detectors" and "bans" as useless as broken condoms. There's a reason that Vox Day and Jon Del Arroz can turn shitposts into full product releases within a week, soon a weekend, and have an entire trilogy of novels in digital and print up on Amazon within a month and make serious bank doing so- they know the tools and can strike while the iron is hot to profit on a meme wave while it's relevant. (If you know how Vox writes, that's massive.)
The last refuge for the holdouts is on Prestige Release Formats: high-cost, high-expense hardcover productions with lots of addons (appendices, annotations, etc.) where a single copy is at least $100 and likely some multiple of that. Anything that can be done On Demand just had its pricing crater as a consequence of how fast and easy it is to produce the content that those formats hold and deliver to the end user.
Which means that the already-waning commercial viability of the hobby just got nuked. GOOD.
This guy didn't realize it, but he proved that "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction" ARE FAKE GENRES!
TLDR: All that changes are the trappings and the setting. The narrative structure is IDENTICAL so they play out EXACTLY THE SAME WAY!
This is why Andre Norton and Leigh Brackett can write "science fiction" that is really "fantasy" with a bare whiff of justification for the tale's telling: they are both doing Fantastic Adventure fiction, same as Burroughs, Meritt, Moorcock, Howard, Smith, and everyone else in Appendix N.
It's also why Shadowrun is just D&D With Chrome & Guns; changing the trappings and the setting didn't change the substance of gameplay one damned bit.
Dune (and its knockoffs, 40K and Fading Suns) is just a resetting of The Sabers of Paradise (go look that one up).
Star Wars (the original) is The Hidden Fortress plus The Dambusters.
Never, ever mistake a Product Category for a Genre; the former is a Brand Name thing, while the latter is all about narrative structure- seeming vs. substance.
"Fantasy" does not exist. "Science Fiction" does not exist. There are other fake genres; they also do not exist.
I regularly post Razorfist's video about how BattleTech is really held and controlled by the fans- not the corpos.
I posit that this is also viable for Uncle George's Space Opera. Use the old West End Game if you want something instantly familiar and usable, but that's not the only option; the reason is that what you really want is a game where the capacity to translate from either IRL or Approved Lore measurements to game terms and back is trivially easy to do by the hobbyist.
Why? Because a fan-controlled Star Wars is one where fan channels who actually get the IP and can contrbute to it competenly and effectively are going to be where you go to find things to include that the Enemy never would- for example:
The Devil Mouse would never go for that.
This is the flip-side of the mass proliferation of digital content generation tools and distribution channels. Can you produce Endless Product Slop? Sure. You can also know where the human touch matters more, and use those same tools to clear away the bitchwork so that you can focus time and attention on what you specifically add to the overal result.
We don't need corpos or merchants selling us what our stories are anymore. We need to know how to seize, hold, and use these tools instead. Fuck Muh Commercial Viability; if this means it's only done by hobbyists for hobbyists because you can't make a living at it, that's a net improvement as it culls the disinterested grifters from the space.
I told you that the answer to AI freakouts would be people flat-out lying about using it.
Wizards of the Coast already does this, nakedly and openly. Revealed Preferences show that NORMIES DO NOT CARE.
You can take all the polls where they say all the Approved Opinions, but when it comes time to buy shit they (a) reveal that they can't tell and (b) reveal that they don't care. Why? For the same reasons that most people don't buy hand-made knives or clothes: the price is way too high for what you get.
The reality is this: when the moneybags see that it's 10x cheaper, but just as good or better, to do it with bots than men the bots get deployed EVERY SINGLE TIME.
Hell, they get deployed when it's only half as good when it's 10x cheaper.
Yes, this does mean publishing is going to change too; the moneybags will gladly sack human authors for House Names attached to bot-generated genre content template output, and now that the tech exists you can even interview them.
At 21:00 you see the interview segment; neither of them are in the depicted space- both of them are remoting into it via hologram tech over the Internet.
You had better believe that they can just make an overlay for a House Name and use it for interviews, and it's going to be cheap and easy to do very soon.
You want to interview Amelia, the meme girl representing UK Remigration? You will be able to before the end of the year; for now, this means someone else (using voice-changing software and livestream overlay technology, both quite mature now) will be able to perform the role. Not long from now, a model trained up to be her on command will be able to do that in real time on the fly.
You want to smear your enemies? Going to be very easy to do now.
You want to churn out plenty of novels in short order? Nevermind Claude; what matters is that you can automate the entire process, including several rounds of "remove AI-isms", including making the cover and formatting for ebook and print for upload to Amazon/B&N/Lulu/etc. while you're off doing other things. People are already making bank doing this; you know who you are.
So no, don't think you can do jack shit about widespread AI adoption and implementation. The ones with the power want this to happen, so it happens and it happens because they benefit from having it. No matter what you say, all they care about is what you do; if they can lie to you to get you to do what they want, they will and they've already justified doing so to themselves so no amount of moral scolding means shit to them. The ability to make them always exceeds the capacity to detect them.
Which means that, contra the hopes of some, the days of bot-generated books and games is far from over.
With the Trump Administration gutting the funding behind Blackrock's ESG bullshit, this is now in retreat- retreat, not yet surrender.
Surrender is coming so long as the pressure keep ramping up and no backstopping of funding appears; right now that is guaranteed, but a fuckup can change that on a dime. As it is, however, we are looking at this being dead and gone in about the time it took to bloom and flourish- a decade.
The reason? The Death Cult is always subserviant to the Mammon Mob, so when Line Does Not Go Up the Mob gets anxious and when it goes down and keeps falling they get mad- and blame the Death Cult (rightly) for it. As the Mob has the superior position (i.e. control over the money that makes it all possible), the Mob gets its way sooner or later and the Cult gets punted to the ditch.
The problem is people with the inability to get beyond instant gratification. This doesn't turn on a dime- not in film, not in TV, not in Vidya, not in Tabletop, nothing.
In addition to sandbagging by Stay Behinds within an organization, you have the ordinary issue of there being a long lead time for any major corporate media production. Films typically are three years, Vidya is three to five, OldPub is at least a year and often more, and Tabletop is at least as bad. It's going to take time for the cleanup to make itself manifest.
That means you're going to seek plenty of suck for the near term. The signs will begin showing up in no less than a year from now.
This also means that it's going to be uneven; some organizations will turn around faster than others, with the primary determinant being the ratio of Mobster to Cultist within an organization as the Mobster dominance will prompt faster turnarounds.
All said, remember that the Mammon Mob is not your friend; they serve a different demon, but they still serve a demon. All this means is that the Death Cult funnel from the Pop Cult gets cut off in favor of retrenching and doubling-down on the Pop Cult idolatry- they want full-tilt Idol Culture Give All Your Money In Devotion To Something That Can't Love You levels of false religion.
This is the list from Appendix N of the AD&D1e DMG.
The "Fantasy" side:
Robert E. Howard's Conan series — Barbarism vs. civilization, ancient sorcery, monstrous horrors, and heroic adventure (no scientific framing).
Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & Gray Mouser series — Urban thieves, wizards, demons, and quirky sword & sorcery in the world of Nehwon.
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings — Elves, dwarves, orcs, ents, halflings (hobbits), rangers, dragons, and epic quests (Gygax downplayed Tolkien's overall impact but acknowledged specific borrowings).
Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions — Norse/Arthurian mythic fantasy, faerie realms, regenerating trolls, paladins, and Law vs. Chaos alignment.
Lord Dunsany's works — Dreamlike fantasy, gods, and wonder-tales.
Michael Moorcock's Elric/Stormbringer and Hawkmoon series — Chaotic swords, multiversal fantasy, and Law/Chaos themes (influenced alignment and artifacts).
Gardner Fox's Kothar and Kyrik series — Sword & sorcery pulp with liches and lost-world adventures.
John Bellairs' The Face in the Frost — Wizards studying spellbooks (direct Vancian precursor, but pure fantasy).
Lin Carter's World's End series — Distant-future fantasy (but leans more mythic than technological).
August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman, and others — Horror-tinged fantasy or weird tales.
The "Science Fiction" side:
Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars (Barsoom), Venus, and Pellucidar series — Planetary romance with alien civilizations, radium-powered airships/flyers, ancient tech, hollow-Earth inner worlds, and sword-swinging adventures on other planets or inside Earth. (Sci-fi framing via "science" of alien biology/tech and interplanetary travel; heavily influenced exotic settings and lost-world dungeons.)
Poul Anderson's The High Crusade — Pure sci-fi: medieval English knights capture an alien spaceship and fight interstellar invaders. (Spaceships, aliens, and technology as the core conflict.)
L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall — Time-travel sci-fi: a modern archaeologist is transported to the Dark Ages and uses knowledge to prevent societal collapse. (Temporal displacement and applied science/history.)
de Camp & Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea series and The Carnelian Cube — Modern protagonists use mathematical/logical formulas to enter parallel mythic universes (e.g., Norse gods, Irish legends). Magic is analyzed and countered scientifically; alternate dimensions via equations. (Direct influence on D&D's planar/multiversal travel and "logic vs. magic.")
Philip José Farmer's World of the Tiers series — Pocket universes and artificial worlds created by god-like ancient beings using advanced technology; interdimensional gates/portals and unique solar systems. (Sci-fi multiverse and demi-planes; inspired Oerth-like settings.)
Jack Vance's The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld — Far-future Earth where the sun is dying and ancient super-science has decayed into "magic." Spells are memorized formulas (Vancian magic system); ioun stones and bizarre tech-magic. (Core to D&D's spellcasting and thief elements.)
Roger Zelazny's Amber series and Jack of Shadows — Shadow worlds as reflections of a prime reality (parallel dimensions); a tidally locked planet split between science and magic sides. (Multiversal travel with tech-magic blend.)
Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey — Post-nuclear apocalypse on a mutant-riddled Earth; telepathy/psionics, ancient tech remnants, and priestly quests. (Science fantasy with psi powers.)
Fred Saberhagen's Changeling Earth (Empire of the East) — Post-apocalyptic Earth where magic and technology coexist (AI "gods," changelings). (Blended sci-fi ruins and sorcery.)
Margaret St. Clair's The Shadow People and Sign of the Labrys — Dystopian futures, vast underground labyrinths, and societal collapse. (Inspired dungeon complexes, drow/underdark ideas, and sci-fi horror.)
Leigh Brackett, Frederic Brown, Stanley Weinbaum, Jack Williamson, and Andre Norton — Mostly planetary sci-fi, space opera shorts, or speculative tales (aliens, future tech, mutants); Brackett's planetary romances echo Burroughs.
There is NO DIFFERENCE! The trappings are not the genre. The setting is not the genre. The genre is in narrative structure, not marketing a product; these stories all have the same narrative structure, so they are all the same genre: fantastic adventures.
Therefore they can all fit into--and use exactly as written--the same ruleset because they're all part of the same game: a fantastic adventure game of Braunstein play.
This is why, decades before Banpresto gave us a different example of the same thing in Super Robot Wars, AD&D1e could and did handle all of this using the rules as they are- and it explains why, despite the Boomerism of its designer and publsher, RIFTS maintains its enduring appeal as it too put the lie to "Fantasy", "Science Fiction", and "Horror" as separate and distinct genres- they are, at best, product categories following Madlib templates like Harlequin reduced love stories to Chicklit mass production content output- something that LLMs can do better than any human writer could ever achieve.
This is why, believe or not, these are Fair Game for the Real Game.
Remember what Arch did yesterday? Hilary Lane comes in for the layup.
The reality is that Public Relations professionals--the secularlization of ancient cult indoctrination techniques--knew this over a century ago; again, read Propaganda by Edward Bernays and Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (they're the two founders of Public Relations, the category that holds Advertising and Marketing as jobs).
Pay attention to her usage of a woman's perception of Korean men being warped by K-Dramas as an example. This is how Public Relations techniques can create an illusion of How Things Work, and if the systems of everyday life don't match up to the illusion then that disparity becomes the liminal space wherein weaponized resentment becomes the festering wound from which Death Cult political action roots itself.
Yes, this is how Hannah the Post-Wall Heifer gets radicalized (an irreversible process, like Chaos Corruption) into voting for Death Cult people and policies so long as they can hold out believable promises to guarantee that Hannah gets a state-mandated K-Drama Korean man issued to her for her enjoyment.
Hilary brings the receipts. She shows the troon in Minnesota justifying child access to porn (specifically child porn) as being necessary and proper for the cultivation of troon identity. Talk about giving away the game.
Watch it. If you are an honest man, you will see that she is indeed right- and the tell is that all the right people are furious with her.
This is becoming more than just about porn-addled shitlibs Hannahs.
Late last weekend, Jon Del Arroz cut this video on the end of Rise of the Merlin.
Near the end he makes plain the same thing that Professor DM did with regard to his YT channel: if you are not talking about The Dominant Thing YOU DO NOT MATTER!
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Google (i.e. SEARCH ITSELF) deliberately tanks whatever is not the dominant thing in a niche; this is a Second Order Network Effect because what is happening is that one technology utterly dependent upon Network Effects exerts its power over a lesser (and yes, Trek is lesser than Social Media in itself) Network by culling all discussion within its network of anything but The Thing On Top within that niche.
This is before any deliberate manipulation. The technology, by its nature, does this.
You can't blame Elon, Dorsey, the lizardman at Meta, the Illuminati, or whatever for this. This is entirely on the Nomries themselves. What the technology did is give real power in real time to the Revealed Preferences of the anonymized mass of Normies, Tourists, and Casutals that dominate all niches within the global culture industry.
You are seeing, in real time, just how difficult it is to fight against an undesirable position when Network Effects are so strong a factor in How Society Works.
No, you can't Thousand True Fans your way out of this; mass media, by its nature, cannot be splintered down to such small silos that you can have that be a viable option and yet maintain the mass media cultural institutions- nevermind seize control of them.
What this means is that a lot of discourse about the corpo-controlled mass media brands and their Network Effects is 100% wrong.
Paramount gave no fucks about JDA's book. Paramount brought out the big guns against Axanar, and Paramount is dog-fucking Seth MacFarlane over The Orville. The Revealed Preferences are the tell. Books DO NOT MATTER. Comics DO NOT MATTER. Film, Television, and Streaming matter.
We see this repeated in Tabletop. WOTC ignores most of Tabletop because Not-D&D DOES NOT MATTER. Games Workshop only cares about minis (still, for now, the cornerstone of their business model) and tie-in mass media (i.e. videos and Vidya). Not-40K? DOES NOT MATTER. Not-Fantasy? DOES NOT MATTER.
Normies, et. al.--i.e. THE AUDIENCE YOU'RE AFTER--will not, even if God Himself said so, turn away from the Brand until it is so disgusting and repgnant that it triggers a critical mass of them all at once; then something equally ruinous (for us) happens- they switch off THE ENTIRE CATEGORY permanently, barring successful rehabilitation attempts (rare, expensive, but possible), and nothing will convince them otherwise- and no, you're not going to rehabilitate it.
Network Effects are the strongest Walled Garden system that there is. They reinforce Brand Loyalty by making the friction for defection so high as to be ruinous for Normies to do so, until it is preferable to amputate that cultural element entirely than suffer futher.
If you want to win, you have to be seen by the people you're fighting over. Like it or not, "Complain about Brand, then offer The Same But Different alternative actually fucking works and moves the needle. No one would care about the Bros if we didn't talk about D&D. No one cares about what Josh Strife Hayes says if he didn't talk about World of Warcraft. You get the idea.
You are not fighting this war as an equal. You are waging an insurgency. Your job, right now, is to generate and sustain support by the population. You cannot do that outside the Network, so you cannot succeed outside the Network; you have to learn how to leverage it to your advantage- the Bros successfully did this by changing the discourse about The Only Game That Matters such that YT grifters try so hard to either steal them for their own gain or to defame the Bros to the same end.
Therefore a different approach must be taken, one that well-meaning dissidents will balk at, but the tells from the corpos show--by their fears--what needs to be done.
Make your own Branded material. Corpos play dirty; you gotta play dirtier to win, and the tools they use--information disparties, global arbitrational arbitrage, etc.--are now at your command also.
Make that 40K fanfilm. Host it where GW's lawyers get told to pound sand. Hide your names behind global privacy rules. Learn how outlets like Caribbean Thule publish and distribute actually banned books and shamelessly copy their methods; this includes their finances. Make that Trek series; host it where takedown requests get routed to /dev/null. Make a 40K rulebook that isn't shit, share the PDF freely and include a POD-friendly version so folks can run off their own copies at-cost via unlisted Lulu uploads (or something like it). You get the idea; this is Samizdat Territory, so act like it.
Then promote the hell out of it; show off your hardcopies on your socials. Screen it at cons; have QR codes on hand for folks to access it online. Get folks to donate to Uncle Gene's Better Space Literature Society and be surprised (LOL) at getting your own copy of The Trek Show That Paramount Won't Make arrive in a 20 disc BD boxed set a month or so later.
"But that's-"
No one cares. Normies run off vibes; corpos went hard after Axanar because it has better Trek vibes than anything official so the Normies embraced it as legit. That is what must be done; make things with superior vibes and shove it into their faces. Trek, Star Wars, D&D, 40K- you name it, it can be done. Now YOU control the Netwok Effect, and that vast mass media audience will default to listening to YOU.
That's what the enemy understands--go read Edward Bernays; this has been in the open for over 100 years--and it's time to face that these are the rules of the game.
Last weekend, Iassc Young explained again why the Critical Drinkers, Geeks & Gamers, Doomcocks, etc. are worse than useless.
To be clear, I am well past the point of arguing YouTube critics should stop doing what they’re doing. It’s weak moral scolding that also sucks oxygen out of the room for independent creation. Also, the opportunity for boycotting Hollywood has long passed—had it ever been real to… https://t.co/cusUgYokaZpic.twitter.com/Hl8wTZzuVo
You can't beat one from the outside, so you have to fight from within it; you also can't offer non-Brand alternatives so long as the Brand that generates the effect is active and functional.
Only Alt-Trek (e.g. The Orville and fanfilms & Old Trek (past series) threatens Current Trek.
Only Alt-D&D and Old D&D threatens Current D&D.
Only Alt-WOW (private servers) and Old D&D (Classic) threatens Current WOW.
The only one who's figured out how to make it work at all is Jon Del Arroz. He pitches in-category alternatives after catching attention by leveraging the Network Effect of a Brand Cult to get eyeballs and use that dissatisfaction to pitch his indie substitution. The least you can do is copy that formula; complain about Brand, then offer alternative to Brand.
That's Good Enough. Normies will watch it. They will pay to watch it. Folks screaming about how bad AI is now are either performative wankers or grossly overestimate what Normies will accept in media.
Remember that is is Nomies that demand "The Same, But Different" in their media; they absolutely accept AI-generated media that is Good Enough and keeps up the industrial-level production of The Same, But Different in their preferred media.
This is not about going from hand-painted cel animation to near-perfect photorealistic live-action. This is about one or two folks, using AI tools, replacing 80% of the people doing bitchwork in media production with machines and software; human involvement moves up the value chain to Command Decision level by cutting out everyone under that level. As it is now, you can have those folks churning out ads (and they already are, as Corridor Crew noted recently) and trailers.
We have people using it to make political ads, merging Meme Culture with Ad Production to be able to seize the zeitgeist effectively and efficiently; AI-generated ads will be the norm within a year or two because they are 90% or less cheaper to make and easier to produce. With the wide release of AI models able to generate consistent video of longer and longer lengths (again, reference what Seedance 3.0 is already rumored to do) this will eat up the entire business.
Live Action is not safe. Animation is not safe. Nothing in media production of any kind is safe anymore. Commercial pressures will compel widespread adoption, trumping everything else, especially since the Chinese will use it to swamp the world with media that is Good Enough to satsify the Normies and that alone will be enough to force the issue. Holdouts will lose, lose fast, and lose decisively.
Hand-crafted, for lack of a better term, will become an luxury. Luxuries do not generate revenue; they are COSTS, EXPENSES, not GENERATORS. The AI-generated production is what will make the "all-human" stuff possible- not viable, POSSIBLE. Just like mass-produced knives, clothes, guns, etc. are what make the hand-made versions possible because otherwise the skills would be lost due to disincentive to learn and practice them- as we've seen with hand-production of paper, hand-binding of books, etc. vs. machine-produced versions.
You had better believe C-Suites across the media business landscape are paying attention. This turnover is already happening, and now it cannot be stopped.
Dude gets it. Lots of these bundles of sticks deserve their job losses; they deserve worse and less.
AAA believes they are entitled to your time, attention, and money. Games Journos--those subhumans--are the goblins running defense for them.
They deserve their failures. They deserve their backruptcies. They deserve their job loses, their career setbacks, their enventually--and, now, inevitable--blackballing.
I support AI for one primary reason: that is the technology that guarantees the destruction and deletion of these hacks, and their eventual discovery near tall river-spanning bridges everywhere.
As for Vidya, so for all media.
That is worth the price of YouTube being filled with a Googleplex of AI-generated fanfilms; you'll find something worth watching out of that- not so as things are now.
The books? The comics? The music? Games? All the same: you WILL find something worthwhile- you won't if the Death Cultists and Mammon Mobsters retain control of the media.
Yarvin's going to get his world of endless absolutist city-states with No Say and Free Exist; it will just exist in pop culture, not in political reality.
Hollywood demands Seedance 2.0 removal after AI Video goes viral.
The Motion Picture Association issued a takedown demand to ByteDance after Seedance 2.0 generated a photorealistic Tom Cruise vs Brad Pitt fight scene from a short prompt.
One: No, it's not. Well over 80% of people watching these things will not notice that this is AI-generated; they will, at most, think of this as a SFX showcase to drum up software sales and business contracts.
Two: This is as bad as it will be. It only gets better from here, and the rumors of v3.0 on Chinese social media state that single-prompts go to 10 minutes at a time in length. Nine of those is a 90 minute movie, which remains the ideal length that exhibitors want for maximum revenue potential
Three: They will not be able to regulate or lawfare the threat away; this is a global issue, so the rules are actually defined by the party that cares least about IP law- and that means Russia, China, Southeast Asia, and the Stans between them. China, in particular, wipes its ass with US and European IP law. They already have no problem with hosting content that violates it; they will be glad to host and stream AI-generated content that does so.
As we are already seeing with prose/comics (an AI-generated LN already won awards) and Tabletop, we shall see with Vidya and film/TV: total disruption of the existing market and social State of Play. Go ahead, go to YouTube; there's a flood of AI-generate Star Wars fanfilm shorts, which will only get longer and better over the next few years, which itslef is a follow-on from (very formulatic) Human Fuck Yeah audiobook channels (increasingly with accompanying illustrations).
If I'm posting Doomcock, it's not to signal-boost him.
No, this is not about how bad this Fake Trek is anymore than how bad Mouse Wars is.
What I am going to put to you is that those of you thinking that the demolitions of these franchises (and others) by the Death Cult are coming to an end are going to be disappointed. No, not for the very obvious reasons--the replacements are acolytes of those departing, so it's only going to get worse--but for a reason that only David Stewart (and myself) have said: The Normies are not going to abandon the Brand.
Normies do not go out of their way for a damned thing, and Normies do not trust anything that lacks the (seeming of) institutional support. They'll keep coming back to these two Brands because they are The Ones That Matter; Your Favorite Not-Film/TV Thing does not matter because that support does not (seem) to exist.
This is the vain hope akin to all the D&D YouTubers thinking that Wizards of the Coast are fucked and Current Edition is dead.
You are not getting that Netflix deal. You are not going to be scouted by Hollywood (or its counterparts elsewhere). You are outside the Normiesphere, and because you are outside that bubble you do not exist.
The fight for the culture is fought in the Normiesphere. That's the battlefield, because the Normies are both the prize and the battlefield; they, as an aggregate, determine what the culture is by what they consume and demand. This is why AAA Gaming matters, while Indies (outside a few Noticed By The Dorito Pope) struggle to make headway, and so on.
It's why the Death Cult seized, and holds, the gates separating the Normiesphere from Everything Else.
How then to deal with it? I've told you this several times before; it applies to all cultural elements.
You want to fight? You have to do so FROM THE INSIDE!
This is why The Orville matters while Your Totally Original Take On The Premise, Really, You Mean It does not. The Orville has institutional support, and thus is within the Normiesphere; your Indie Darling does not, so it is not, so no one sees it and thus it has no impact on the culture.
It is not enough to do good work. It is not enough to get good word of mouth. You have to be seen by the Normies to matter. That means finding a way into the Normiesphere and hijacking the Network Effect to your advantage. Seth had good relations with FOX, so he got to do his Trek Fanfic Show. Vic Mignolia had some acting pals, some time, and some money so he could do his his own Trek Fanfic Show which got an audience and even Shatner's approval of Vic's performance as Kirk.
This is where we are now, like it or not, and the enemy knows it; that is why they are relentless about seizing and holding Brands and gatekeeping the Normiesphere- and it's why they are so relentless in pursing any they don't control (see the recent fuckery regarding 40K). They can only rule when they have Total Narrative Supremacy, so they have to have Total Media Control across the board- not even your hobbies and passtimes are exempt.
The good news is that it is possible, increasingly, to cut the corpos out of the loop entirely and hijack the Network Effect for ourselves. The release of generative AI means making your own Brand stuff is easier than ever, and it's not hard to do better than incompetent Death Cult corpo crap. Just take a look at how fans clown on the Mouse. Even the shitposters mocking it all are putting out better stuff than the Mouse, and because it has the Brand Normies will watch it.
Fight where the war is, not where you wish it was. Fight in the Normiesphere, inside the dominant Network, where the people that matter will see it and care about it, and seize its Effect for your own advantage.
It also means that creating outside the Normiesphere now must be done for its own sake, and as that realization hits expect a lot of people to GTFO and go where the action is.
My friend Oliver Campbell has opened a storefront for his art. It's called "The Digital Noosphere" and you can find it here.
The Noosphere: the "sphere of human thought," representing a stage of evolutionary development where collective human consciousness and mental activity become a dominant influence on the Earth.
This place, the Digital Noosphere, combines our creative human minds with generative AI tools, and the necessary delicate human touch that sparks life into art, helping us stay connected and be human.
Stay and explore, and find something you enjoy. Buy with confidence; all of the works here are extremely high quality, and unrivaled.
It's an art store. Oliver makes his own images to Print On Demand. He takes commissions and he'll frame things for you, even if it's not currently listed; if you want something Just For You, ask him. I suggested the Aviator pic you see below, and as soon as I can spare the cash I'm buying the framed version.
Examples:
You want to know how he does it? Talk to him. See those socials on the main page? Check them. He is one man, using the tools now at his disposal, to use his acumen as an artist to create works of quality with such alacrity that it is astounding. This is stuff that would otherwise take weeks or more to produce, and he can do it in minutes--I've seen him do it; that's how the Avaviator got made--and he's already fulfilling orders- including one to Finland and one to Japan, so far.
The best part? There is nothing he's doing that you can't. He'll talk about that too if you ask him.
Like something? Buy it. Want something? Ask him. This isn't the old days; you don't have to chose between fast, good, or cheap now. You can get all three.
This dropped about a week ago. Nothing changed since then, and Clownfish is right to say "We told you so!" about this.
Lots of people are going to either learn how to do the startup game, or they're going to have to rely on patronage via Patreon/Subscribestar/etc.
No, you ain't going to Japan, South Korea, etc. either (unless you're one of them AND you're accepted as by them- not the same thing).
Remember the "safe anime" video? That's coming for Western animation out of the corpos, and because you can reduce all of that to a Madlib template you can automate that shit good and hard; what formerly took teams of dozens, scores, or hundreds will soon be done by single-digit teams- and it is an indie animated satire that proves that this is how it will go.
The Will Stancil Show! [FULL EPISODE]
Episode Four: Triumph of the Will After a failed campaign causes him to crash back to reality, Will Stancil binges on tacos and beer with his friends. By Emily Youcis 2025 pic.twitter.com/llNiaUAaT0
You can bet that a handful of people, with financing from a dedicated Patreon following, can easily do better than that on a far more frequent publishing schedule going forward.
"But I can just work on a corpo IP show."
LOL-fucking-NO! They're going to hand that to some connected insiders, who are going to have someone riding heard over them all the way, who can do top-end production cheap, on time, and to spec- exactly the sort of thing bots are excellent at delivering.
At this point, and for the foreseeable future, LLM-based machine generation works like spinning up a factory: you're going to spend a lot of time tooling the machine to execute on the template that you impart upon it, but once you do then you can churn out The Same But Different dirt cheap at industrial scale. Then, when you are done, you can archive all of that up-front work instead of letting it rot or wear out; if demand again returns past the threshold of commercial viability, pull it out from the archive and start the machine churning out more of The Same But Different until that welcome is again worn out.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
That's how corpo animation will be in a few years. Live-Action will take a while longer, but it will follow; data used for one form is applicable to another, and motion-capture is a thing (as are virtual sets), so all that tech James Cameron pioneered for Avatar will--like Lucas did generations before--will become industry standard by the time a child today comes of age.
Which, by the way, means that current issues--like the recent cessation of Super Sentai production--will be permanently solved inside a decade.
You won't be worried about having nothing to read, watch, or play. You will be worried about being buried under a mountain of mediocre mass media and be (nigh-)unable to opt out of it.
And don't be surprised if getting away from this is not commercially viable. I've warned you about the need for the underground to exist, to be non-commercial. Now you're starting to see why.
Want to know a big driver in the decline of anime and manga?
Pathological risk aversion, especially in an environment where the consequences for failure are high and the margin of error is non-existant, is what made this happen in Japan. The attempt from within to fix the problem, while appreciated, will not succeed because this is the sort of problem where you must have outside intervention to solve it because it is a problem that comes from ordinary, sensible responses to existential threat.
This means that "The same, but different" is not just a Tabletop problem, or an Anglophone problem, but a global one. Everywhere is enshitifying. The mismatch between expectation and reality alone is so severe that it's forcing people into the retreat of the familiar just to remain functional between their ears. Not sane, functional.
Mammon Mobsters are responsible for this form of the collapse pattern; the Molech Maniacs would be going full-on immolation of whatever they control, burning it to ash, instead because their mission is more important than the institution/culture's survival (and the elite within expect to be able to jump ship anyway).
The collapse pattern, therefore, is not going to be confined to Tabletop. It's not going to be an Anglophone issue. It's global, across all media, and it's all due to the confluence of Network Effects, Revealed Preferences, and Macro-Economic Forces.
You should reconsider your plans if you think you're going to be making a living via media production.
The retail end of the Collapse is going to be too obvious to ignore next year.
Diamond couldn't get it together. That was Chapter 11. They're giving up, hence Chapter 7.
As many of the shops fed by Diamond also sell boardgames, cards, Tabletop, etc. this kneecaps so many hobby industries that are already struggling to stay in meatspace instead of going solely through online shops (including Amazon). Expect shops in your area (if you're in the US) to close, change inventory, or even change business model (which is what they should do; if anyone is primed to convert to Private Member Clubhouses funded by membership dues, or Event Centers available for space rental, it's the retail sector).
Couple this with the big online stores being able to sell at a discount, or with free shipping, to customers and you can see why retail keeps getting crushed unless it's something like fast food or needs to be tried on.
Get used to buying on Amazon, DriveThru, or resellers (Ebay, Half-Price, etc.).
These are the sorts of videos that the Professor does best.
TLDR: A combination of algo fuckery, Network Effects, and Black Swans force the Professor to axe categories of content from his channel. This would be confirmed by Derik on Roll For Combat.
As much as most people with the sense God gave a diseased donkey would take the hint and close up shop, let's engage with the Professor's understated position--he's staying up, but shifting content focus--and be charitable about it.
SILO HARDER!
That's what YouTube rewards above and beyond anything else. You must niche, and niche hard, into a very narrow content silo to succeed on YouTube; this is why that Simon guy has so many channels--Warfronts, PoliticalFronts, Places, Into The Shadows, etc.--where he can take the same event and churn out several videos because each channel focuses on a very narrow content niche and his team knows that sensationalism sells so they get clickbaity with it.
The day of a channel being at all broad in its content is long over; that the Professor didn't do this sooner shows that he's like most in education and not as bright as he'd like to believe.
This is his business. He is approaching this as a business. Good on him; that already makes him better than most on YouTube trying to become the next Mr. Beast or Dr. Disrespect. One of the things to recognize is that businesses can and do fail, and do so through no fault of their own, so there is no shame in just closing shop and moving on; the smart folks in business do this as soon as they see that it's not feasible to continue. Take the hint, Professor, and close your business; you already have Patreon, where you busk instead, so use that and be done with it.
You want more signs of the collapse? Here they are. I said this was an outside-in collapse pattern; that applies to the influencers like the Professor as much as it does to the publishers and merchants. He said so himself: the channels with the biggest Network Effects are the ones that will endure, while smaller ones like him either close or conform by siloing harder into more narrow niches.
Yes, JDA, I hear you: "Niche harder, make more channels, and get on with it" is indeed the entrepreneural response to this but the Professor doesn't have it in him to do that. He wants his one channel to pay some of his bills so his dayjob paycheck as a school teacher goes further, and that's not going to cut it anymore- and YouTube wants it that way.
Close up, Professor. You're better off retreating to Patreon.
YouTube is being a faggot, to no one's surprise. Bother him for how to get it since YT thought saving lost media is piracy and made him cut it out from the video.
Get copies. Figure out how to spin up servers; get that shit running. MechWarrior: Living Legends and especially MechWarrior Online needs the competition.
