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.
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.
Spoopy Day, so here's something I concluded about Muh Horror a long time ago: it's the flip-side of Supers.
Supers and Horror are the same fantasy from opposing points of view. For the Super, you are the overpowered party engaging opposition that--save for some equal or greater to you, which remains a rarity--you can easily handle most of the time so the point ceases to be stopping the opponents so much as it is defeating the plan behind their actions. Horror puts you in the position of the ordinary opposition taking on opposition that is greater than you in power- sometimes so much so that direct confrontation doesn't even rise to suicidal, like Ordinary Man vs. Superman (and no, Lex Luthor is not ordinary; neither is Bruce Wayne) so you are forced to outthink and outwit the superhuman opposition to win, for certain definitions of "win".
You get a sense of this, believe it or not, with 40K media.
If you're the ordinary men, that's a horror scenario. For the Marines, this is a Super scenario- until the end, when the power differential flips and now they face a Horror scenario.
That's it. That's the basis of Horror; are you underpowered vs. the opposition you face.
This is why Horror scenarios are always, in Tabletop parlance, "one-shots"; as nothing less than Resident Evil/Biohazard shows, the instant you become capable of facing the threat on a more or less even level it ceases to be horror and becomes a Weird Adventure with a sinister tone to it.
"Nazi" and "Fascist" are just weaponized words. Appeals to morality are just weaponized attacks using our decency against us. Yet, as the British discovered over the last weekend, they are not the majority that they pretend to be and when that becomes apparent to them they freak out and start reverting to type: instant appeals to hard power, if they control State organs, and outright criminality when they don't.
They didn't kill Kirk from a position of strength. They killed him as a stopgap move due to weakness; the reactions--including Trump agreeing to make Antifa a designated terrorist organization, something that has far-reaching consequences--are the revelation of this fact.
And Sam Hyde made it plain: either we get them now, or we're dead.
The first two or so minutes of Sam Hyde’s new video is probably the most powerful video content ever posted on this site. Not a single word of this superfluous. If you haven’t watched the full video, watch it now. pic.twitter.com/4dtKM5OWwT
We cannot co-exist. They have declared it so; there is no turning back now. There is only war. If our State power and majority status is not enough, then we'll be forced to do it ourselves the hard way. It won't be the first time.
Fortunately, the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization is exactly that war mobilization.
Years ago, back during the Gamergate days, I said that the final line of defense for the enemy was the banking sector. I am now being proven right.
This is not just bitter bloated bitches screetching into their husbands' ears to add this or that to the Mastercard-10 List (the list that says "LOLno payment processors for you").
This is part of a larger pivot within the institutional positioning of the Death Cult and the Mammon Mob, seeing that they can't poz Eastern media before it eats their lunch, so they are reacting by choking off access to enemy offerings across the board as fast as they can.
Millenial Woes did a good essay about this shift in the enemy's consensus due to a combination of institutional dominance and social/economic incompetence. Go read it. It's generally uplifting, but not without caution; because the enemy has hard power, and it now feels (correctly) threatened, it is using that hard power as hard and fast as it can.
Cutting off the non-compliant from payment processors is what we're hearing about now. Flat-out banking access revocation is next, and remember that in many places in the West you cannot use cash to pay for things anymore so a loss of electronic banking access is tantamount to having your money stolen. Most people cannot withstand that pressure. The enemy knows this; they engineered the system specifically for this reason- and hate Crypto, as well as cash and workarounds like what Gab and Unauthorized use, accordingly.
It's scary. It's going to harm people. It's stil a sign that we are winning. Take heart, praise God, and pass the ammunition.
MentisWave had to remind people that Woke Is Not Dead.
Trump can't do all the work. Some of those bodies need to be piled on by us.
This means that the war isn't over, that we cannot relax, and that we must instead press the advantages we have to continue the fight until this enemy that seeks our very extinction--their words--has instead suffered their own; they are the Terminator, and we remain on Death Ground.
This video article talks about Marvel and Mouse Wars, but this is not confined to those franchises.
TLDR: The young men of the emerging generational cohorts (the Zoomers, and soon to be followed by Gen Alpha) tuned this crap out.
Turns out that when you say "We don't want you!" they listen and go elsewhere. Now that's being felt at the bottom line, with more and more failures. What WDW Pro did not address is that this same thing also applies to the rest of Hollywood, the rest of Western mainstream media (e.g. the failure of Doctor Who), and in Vidya and Tabletop.
The Culture Industry, as controlled by the Death Cult and backed up by the Mammon Mob, relies on Millenials and Gen Y; these are the cohorts now moving into institiutional power in the West and slowly taking over from the Boomers and Jonesers.
What Brian Niemeier said--that the Boomers are handing off to the Millenials as their meme clones--is coming to pass; the other displacements are part-and-parcel of this process.
Go figure that those frozen out are deciding that they can just go where they are treated best instead, and there are places where they are wanted--valued, treasured--out there. Only now is the Death Cult noticing, and boy are they freaking out over the idea that their designated punching bags can escape from the prison prepared for them. You want to know why there is renewed censorship being pushed? This is part of it. You want to know why there is increased detontation of the economy for them? Here it is. TINA must be enforced or the Death Cult loses.
Tabletop has done worse than tried and failed. They did not try at all. Vidya, at the very least, tried and failed to reach the young adults.
The problem is that Tabletop is in a situation similiar to, but not indentical too, what happened in OldPub: ideological capture, supported by the Mammon Mob, calcified around Millenial/Gen Y segments suffering from Troll's Remorse and other vectors for becoming pozzed as Boomers did to the mainstream entertainment industry in the 1980s when they seized control.
The result is that more and more of the existing audience check out of the new releases outside of the core franchse (i.e. other than The Only Game That Matters), such that even Le Indie Darlings no longer move the needle- despite all the chatter claiming otherwise. The data makes it clear that there is only competition within the dominant network and its associated brand; everyone else, even ones that can claim a following of any size, are irrelevant--no one outside of Tabletop cares about RIFTS, despite 35 years of it being in the Top Five, and the same goes for all other brands--
The only big change was the adoption of Virtual TableTops as the norm for play, which--despite Sigil failing--WOTC did achieve to further enhance Official D&D's position of dominance; most people refuse to buy anything they can't use on a VTT (especially WOTC's D&D Beyond), and WOTC's been slowly pushing everyone over to the most recent revision of Official D&D. (That's why Foundry, etc. are so popular on Steam and why Discord/Guilded is so widely used.)
The retroclone push began over a decade ago. That slowed, but did not stop, with Current Edition, and especially as the Old Ways regenerate the hobby the experiences young men crave will draw them in just like Roguelikes and Soulsborns did. The Great Retrenchment means that those young men, if they play at all, will play the older editions because that is where the experience they seek can be done. Just play D&D.
"Walker, why did the Death Cult go so hard on Tabletop?"
I'll let Feral Historian answer that.
The Death Cult needs Clout. Cultural Relevance generates Clout. The Cult cannot generate Clout; it has to parasitize Clout-generating things to use Clout to push the poz.
Whe is something relevant? When it becomes Above The Fold and breaks into the Normiesphere bubble, getting into their faces and insisting upon itself.
It's that last part in particular the the Death Cult wants because the Cult, being a totalitarian ideology, must establish and maintain TINA: (T)here (I)s (N)o (A)lternative. That means, in practice, it must not only insist upon inself it must crowd out all possible alternatives. Tabletop in particular is vulnerable to this due to any given product being wholly reliant on the size of its user network for its value, and the Cultists at Wizards of the Coast would have gotten away with it had D&D in particular not breached the containment of any legal owner and become an egregore to itself.
Believe it or not, but 40K is already most of the way to that point now. It just needs sufficient viable alternatives to Official Edition to finish that transformation. (By contrast, World of Warcraft has also made that transition due to proliferation of private servers permitting containment breach.) Once done, it cannot be taken by the Cult because it cannot be taken by anyone anymore than one can take a tidal wave or a thunderstorm.
That moment has peaked.
The colony drop will destroy so much Death Cult infiltration by destroying what they used as propaganda fronts. While the biggest endures, it has lost control of what it attempted to turn; the same is playing out now in tabletop wargaming, and soon we'll see it happen in other tabletop gaming niches (you can just do things, like make your own cards or minis).
The Clubhouse will stopgap the hobby, preventing this from happening again, once it's all over.
He didn't mince words. This is the end result of Gramasci's Mark Through The Institutions and its generations of multi-level Narrative Warfare, with the explicit intent to invert all morality in order to make possible their seizure of power and extinction of enemies.
Yes, extinction. Unlike others in Modernity, these folks understand that if your people are the only people then your paradigm--and thus power--is the only one. Everyone thinks the same way, so they act the same way, because you can't act on thoughts you don't have.
They are fanatics. They always have been. They always will be. They insist upon themselves, and they react so strongly to depictions of demons and bugs (and other monsters of a similar sort) because those fictions expose their true form to the audience- and they, moreso than anyone else, comprehend the power of entertainment media to shape thought and opinion.
They hate 40K because they see what happens when people think at all about how the Imperium is correct to be what it is. They seized Trench Crusade because it holds the same truth despite all that they have done to confuse it. They hate DOOM and Frieren because both show that there is only guaranteed way to solve the problem they present. They deliberately insist upon BCE/CE because they hate God (which is what changing the label, but not the basis for it, signifies) and wish to confuse people's ability to know why that distinction exists.
They know what they intend to do--are doing, slowly--to us: extinction and replacement. They therefore fear that this will be done to them as a justified defensive measure, like the Crusades were, so they are desperate finish the job. Except that they can't, not in time.
Arch, in the main, is right: they did overextend as a direct result of fanaticism. However, that same fanaticism is what allows them to regroup every time because what is required to permanently solve the problem is never done- and they tell you EVERY SINGLE TIME what it takes, yet no shot-caller believes them and that results in today's victory becoming tomorrow's genocide.
Why do they hate 40K? Because 40K acknowledges what must be done. Why seize Trench Crusade? Because it acknowledges what must be done. Same with DOOM and Frieren- and once that is acknowledged by a critical mass of people with agency, it is over for them AND THEY KNOW IT. That is also why there's been 100+ years of propaganda against it, an entire global regime paradigm making it forbidden, and more: because it's been done before, successfully, in the Old Testament, multiple times.
There is no co-existence with these people; they said so- believe them. There is only war. Your choices are extinction or conquest. I choose conquest. The Fourth Turning is here.
We take this moment to remind you that (a) the Dragon Awards exist and (b) you can nominate for the finals now.
Jon Del Arroz has taken the time to put together a slate. See below.
We need YOUR help to make a big move for sci-fi and fantasy book culture.
The good news is, it’s easy.
Our goal: get great works by incredible authors nominated for major awards. This helps lift a lot of authors, and if we all work together, we have enough votes to ensure nominations.
Our first target will be The Dragon Awards.
After an extensive search, here is who to nominate for the Dragon Awards 2025.
Best Science Fiction Novel: Tsunami of Turmoil by Blaine Pardoe
Best Fantasy Novel: Shadow of a Smoking Mountain by Howard Andrew Jones
Best Young Adult/Middle-Grade Novel: The Prisoner And The Pirate by Jenelle Leanne Schmidt
Best Alternate History Novel: To Turn The Tide by S.M. Stirling
Best Horror Novel: Dark Bloom by Molly Macabre
Best Illustrative Book Cover: Behold: Humanity!: The Inheritor's War art by Rick Ronor
Best Comic Book or Graphic Novel: The Hidden Emperor by Jon Del Arroz and Miz Krimzon
Best Sci-Fi Or Fantasy TV Series: Star Trek: Prodigy (Paramount)
Best Sci-Fi Or Fantasy Movie: The Wild Robot by Chris Sanders
Best Digital Game: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 by Focus Interactive
Best Tabletop Game: ACKS II: Treasure Tome by Autarch
The form will take about five minutes to fill out. Please make sure to put in the above list of works and this push will 100% work to get these great authors all nominated. If we all come in, this WILL work.
Once you’re done, email me at jdaguestposts@gmail.com to confirm you’ve submitted so we can track how many people have done so.
Thank you so much! Let me know if you have any questions.
Jon Del Arroz
Fandom Pulse Awards Committee Organizer
Don't come at me about organizing voting slates. This is how the enemy wins. Organized minorities will beat unorganized majorities every time, which is how the Death Cult seized and holds power (and doesn't give two shits about the people). In order to win the game, you play the rules better than the other guy; this is playing to win, and as no one has any better candidates to stand up these will be what we get behind this year.
You can stop being Normies and LOLberts and actually get some wins if you organized and discipline yourselves as the enemy has, or you can continue to be Normies and LOLberts and keep getting rolled. You cannot win and continue to be Normies and LOLberts. Reality does not work that way. The Sad and Rabid Puppies should have shown this conclusively by now.
Jon took the time to organize a slate. Vote it. Report your vote once you did so. Once the finalists are announced we'll do this again and do our best to get Our Guys wins.
Lather, rinse, repeat year-on-year until it's nothing but Our Guys collecting all the trophies. That's what the enemy does, and it works. You may not think that it matters, but it does because Normies take awards as shortcuts to meaning "Good" so they buy that stuff and (more importantly) their fellows in institutions use those awards to justify pushing it on to people in schools and workplaces.
This is about the culture, downstream of which is politics, but upstream of that is power and power demands organization and discipline to seize and hold. Stop being losers about this; do what it takes to win or you'll find your posterity denoucing you because your enemies seized their minds and poisoned them agains you.
Diversity & Dragons covered this earlier this week.
Yep, usual Death Cult hitpiece bullshit.
Yep, usual Narrative Warfare playbook: do a more or less clean initial effort to get in the door, then start slipping in the poz after this point; if this resembles how the sorts who engage in predatory relationships operate, you're ahead of the game. Cult psychologies do cult things.
Which means that everything he's published to date is suspect. That's a damned shame, because man that's a lot of work to double-check.
I wish I could say that I am surprised or disappointed. I am neither. That's how bad it is.
This weekend we got a reminder that Tabletop's poz problem came from within:
Of course he had an excuse, which (in typical Death Cult fashion) is pure projection.
TTRPGs can be a bridge, but fascists want to burn that bridge. They want one party rule tied to ideas of nationalism and elitism that despises the other and constantly projects a sense of fear that they use to derive power.
I didn't say anything about people who vote Republican
— Jason Bulmahn, Game Designer (@JasonBulmahn) August 9, 2024
By now it's not hard to translate that Death Cult cant: "This is Our Thing, not Your Thing. Get out before we destroy you."
Cultists like him are rotten in the commercial end of Tabletop. They run Wizards of the Coast. They run all of the adjacent operations, such as Paizo (and everyone else out of Seattle), they dominate bottom-feeders like you see on Roll For Combat or cringy wankers like J. Scott Garipay, and they are the majority of the D&DTube loser Tourists.
— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ Space Crusader Vtuber (@HMBohemond) December 26, 2024
"But why then?"
First: This is a Network Effect issue. Being the dominant actor in a market niche that relies on Network Effects means that your brand defines the niche, and if your business starts the transition from being a tabletop gaming brand to being a Intellectual Property brand by extending your brand into tie-in media that has sweet fuck-all to do with tabletop gaming then you are heavily incentivized to turn your brand into a cult idol to worship via Consumerism.
That's what Games Workship did, and is doing, with 40K while trying to more openly poz Fantasy. (See the feminist Bretonian shit in the newer stuff.) Are they backing off? Yes. Are they ending it? No. Like DEI rebranding as BRIDGE off-stage, expect this fuckery to get a reintroduction down the road in a more subtle fashion. That I am pointing this out leads to the big isssue.
You want to get all those dissatisfied eyeballs off The Brand and to something that you know is more to their liking, maybe of your creation or maybe not. You want to exploit the Master's fuckups to either become the Master or the Apprentice in this niche. How do you do that?
As Jon Del Arroz explained the other day, the dissatisfied 40K player and fan just wants 40K to not be shit. They don't want an alternative; they want the broken brand to be fixed.
What if it can't be fixed? That's the case for Current Edition D&D. That's the case for the Big Two in comics. That's the case for OldPub, AAA videogames, and so many others.
(Note: Again, I think that "The Woke is being put away" is a scam; go back to that JDA stream where he calls this out as exactly that. It's being rebranded; it's not going away- and that's why Games Workshop's move on 40K is not yet a win. Everyone that made this problem ARE STILL THERE!)
What you do is what JDA has successfully done with Fandom Pulse: use the Master's Brand to draw attention to the alternative, affirming the audience's complaints with the Master before presenting the alternative that satisfies those complaints. This is how the Apprentice positions itself to shiv and replace the Master. That's why John's videos always mention his books and comics in the context of being a more audience-pleasing alternative to Brand failures.
This applies to Tabletop also.
The best way to get hobbyists mired in the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play is to (a) start with Current Edition or a would-be Apprentice, (b) affirm the complaint that Cultists have with Brand (now they are receptive to persuasion), and then (c) transition the Cultist to the Real Hobby step-by-step by showing them the alternative that better satisfies their needs.
The other way is to bully the retards running the Brand until they relent, but that may not be a lasting result without whole personnel purges to flush out the guilty and replace them with the loyal, something that audiences are notoriously unlikely to accomplish without open warfare. ("Why mention that?" Go ahead, fuck with some sicario's favorite character in a corporate property, see how that works out for you.) Without deliberate organization by a rival, moneied, elite cohort (see The Populist Delusion), this is not viable long-term. Getting the audience to switch to an Apprentice and helping it shiv and replace the Master doesn't, so it is.
And that is how 40K's Tourist Failure revealed how to fix the hobby.
We had a curious thing happen recently on Twitter.
The Brosr have all the ideas needed to save tabletop gaming. Not only have they rediscovered the heart and soul of Arneson's Blackmoor, which is the root of the whole TTRPG hobby, they have added to this knowledge with their explorations of session Braunsteins, explained the…
Nice start, but it goes on to do what Pundit and others anklebiting did by calling the Bros cultists following Jeffro as if he were Lyndon LaRouche or some similar figure.
Containment is the play here. To succeed at Containment of any form of upstart movement, you need to usurp control of it and that means either subverting the leadership or replacing the leadership. Jeffro Johnson is acknowledged as the man leading the #BROSR. He has proven himself unwilling to sell out, so he must be cut out for Containment to succeed, and the most obvious play for achieving that is to do a move right out of Saul Alinksy's infamous playbook Rules For Radicals: "'Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.' Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions."
The problem is that you're trying to do that to a group of people who study war as a hobby, and that study of war includes psychological operations.
The constant attacks on Jeffro show that those seeking to destroy or usurp the momentum generated by the Bros think that they can just depose Jeffro and insert their own man in, who will steer the Bros back into the Conventional Play Cargo Cult step by step until it is fully neutralized.
That itself is telling; it means that someone, somewhere sees this as a threat to be dealt with- and yes, things do get that serious in what seems so minor a thing, because this hobby and medium is not minor. Nothing that has spawned entire billion-dollar franchises, popular literary genres, flat-out defined what "fantasy" means to the Normies worldwide, and otherwise had an impact far disproportionate to its presence.
Someone, somewhere, feels threatened by Jeffro or this wouldn't be happening. This is classic Narrative Warfare, right out of the CIA Playbook, as Mike Benz is now famous for explaining (the first time as Frame Game Radio), and I take that as a badge of honor. Impotent,unimportant, and irrelevant groups don't get targetted like this. Groups that pose a real threat do.
Take a bow, Jeffro. You got the right kind of hater attention.
Since folks are paying attention now, let's explain the Frame Game.
WOTC’s goal of turning their TTRPG into Theater Kid group therapy is quite apparent here.
Add me to the list of Old Timers pointing out that we played these games for decades, with a dizzying variety of people from all kinds of backgrounds, without needing anything like this. https://t.co/S4ER7mZcX5
Why does Sorcerers By The Sea allow Death Cultists to denigrate, defame, and thus attempt to deligitmate Gary Gygax and the other Original Gamers?
The reason is simple: to reframe what "RPG" means into a definition that best-suits what SOBS wants to do with their property to maximizize profit and prestige.
Old Frame: "RPGs are Fantasy Tabletop Wargame Campaigns where heroes and villains content for control of the realm on behalf of their gods."
New Frame: "RPGs are Cooperative Fantasy Storytelling Exercises where we come together and tell our truths through the lens of creating and defending a safe, inclusive world that we made from decolonizing it from reactionary bigots."
To make that Frame Game move work, you need to depreciate the old and put the new in a superior position which allows it to displace the old. That's what the hit piece on Gary and the boys is about.
They are attempting to leverage a social position they already possess in order to use a myth spun on the spot out of wholecloth to justify taking someone else's property, hollowing it out, wearing it as a skinsuit, and using it to Spread The Poz. They will reframe all this as "Decolonizing the White Cis Heteronormative metanarrative and all of its exclusionary, bigoted, and sexist ways in order for the Modern Audience to repurpose it so they may speak their truths in the first steps towards creating a more inclusive world. What we imagine today, we make real tomorrow."
"But Walker-"
DEI. BRIDGE.
They've done it before. Recently. BRIDGE is ongoing as the rebrand of DEI to avoid being whacked by the God-Emperor. This is what they do.
Now take all of this, and through the magic of Psychological Nudgeworks, imagine that SOBS uses the all-digital and always-online Live Service business model for Next Edition and its Free To Play/Pay To Win microtransaction hell to push the poz by exploiting "It's Rude To Suck At D&D" to get players to become pozzed.
How? Make the Pozzed Stuff overpowered IWIN buttons and let Instrumental Play do the rest; if pretending to be a disordered self-mutilated homosexual fetishist is what it takes to do top DPS/top heals/best tanking then that's what the meta is and the meta will be enforced- Best Or Benched. Then start stealth-buff/nerfing things to conform to The Message until Male Human Fighter disappears from the charts and thus the scene because playing one means You Lose. No one wants to carry boat anchors.
You think this doesn't work? Tell it to the folks who do it for a living; it does, and people pay big bucks to make it work for them- including governments.
Keep this up and the old frame becomes unthinkable in short order. Just look at how bad people flip out when you gainsay the Just So shibboleth about RPGs being about story at all; that was the result of persistent Frame Game pushes. If not for the Bros, who are so Frame-breaking about all of this, that job would be complete by now because the OSR can't do Frame Game work to save its life because it can't compuete Narrative Warfare.
The new frame is far more commercially viable than the old frame, which is why the Mammon Mobsters back it. The new frame makes the Molech Maniacs happy, so they back it. To stop this, you have to make one side unhappy and it's easier to make the Mobsters unhappy than the Maniacs so attacks on Line Go Up are the play.
Arch put in a heroic effort to refute this Death Cult brain rot.
But no, this Muh City Planning/Muh Cars Bad retard had to stick his nose into 40K and give the most rotted Death Cult Tourist take- complete with "We must flood into this hobby and push out the Chuds!"
Remember that video I linked yesterday? Here it is again.
Call it synchronicity if you like. That doesn't change the fact that how Genestealers and their cults work to destroy what they infest is so close to how our present Gnostic Death Cult works that you can use it as a guide to purging the Cult with fire and win.
What does a fanatical cult do when it seeks to seize power? Turn language into a weapon. In other words, relentless gaslighting of enemies while signalling to allies. That's what these sort of people do when they cut videos about Muh Media Literacy, or Muh Fascisms, or Muh (Far/Alt) Right; it's all signalling, and in those signals those low in status get their orders--hence the NPC Memes--while those high in status issue their orders.
There is no Dialectical content in their language. It's all Rhetoric. Don't be fooled; engaging on Dialectic grounds is how you lose. You engage on Rhetorical grounds or you lose every single time. The objective is to make them feel pain, and emotionally that means fear and dread. If they do not fear or dread you, you lose every single time. Adam's response shows this in action.
Looks like Adam Something's response to all the people criticizing his shitty Warhammer video boils down to:
-Deleting most of the criticism -Deliberately misinterpreting the criticism he does accept -"My critics are white supremacists/NATZEEZ/misogynists/etc" -And this meme https://t.co/VktOVFqLovpic.twitter.com/H50P29r3Pk
— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ Space Crusader Vtuber (@HMBohemond) December 2, 2024
To permanently deal with them, that pain--including fear and dread--needs to be mortal and insurmountable; they have to believe that you are so intracable that they are better off going elsewhere than dealing with you. If you are able to demonstrate this capacity, do so and leave the voluntold around to display this to others. They are emotional; fear is your ally, and maining your capacity to be fearful is your discipline.
They side with the Bugs, the Tyranids, Chaos, and the Demons for a reason. They are telling you what they are- BELIEVE THEM! Purge them and shut the gates.
I am not kidding about how the Fabricator-General drives Loyalists to rip off their masks.
Until this video came along I thought he was a dorky guy. Mask came off as soon as Elon shitposted about buying D&D.
This is a 25 minute unhinged rant. There is no merit in it, not even "Muh AI! Muh automation!" as that too is just Rhetoric meant to get you to emotionally engage and agree with him. Carl Schmidt would be proud.
Because that's what this is: Friend/Enemy Signalling, with the intent of whipping up an Outrage Mob to deluge upon social media in the hopes of bullying vulnerable targets into compliance.
Yes, that's fucking retarded.
The Death Cultis does not work off secular thinking. It is not logical. It is not reasonable. It is entirely motivated by a religious fervor, as it is a Christian heresy- a form of Gnosticism. Entirely by accident (at least, I think it is), the Death Cult acts so much like a Genesteater Cult that how it operates (complete with the compulsive drive to subvert and poz everything and everyone) as well as what happens when it achieves total victory (utter collapse and self-annihiliation) might as well be taken as a manual.
(And you thought the Media Literacy crowd were just being hipsters.)
Expect more freakout reactions in the short term until they get that Elon was shitposting and trolled them good and hard. Then expect another wave of indignant reactions as being suckered. You are not dealing with reasonable people, but meatpuppets operated by a rampant egregore who'd possessed them and oppressed their brainmeats.
(And yes, Muh Media Literacy retards get their own spotlight tommorw.)
Since the Black Friday Sales are going on all weekend, here's a reminder regarding Sorcerers By The Sea and their fellow travellers at Baizuo and so on.
To which I say that it's time again for the reminder:
Buy used, sail the High Seas, or buy from a clean competitor (e.g. ACKS) if you must buy new. Don't pay for your own demise.
Matt Colville put out a long video about the hobby in the 1970s today.
To which I can summarize thusly:
Why this nearly hour-long diatribe on the early days? Why this promugation of shibboleths and Just So stories?
It's Narrative Warfare. Look at the conclusion you're intended to take away: "Gygax BSed, ergo there is no correct way to play so Conventional Play Cargo Cult is justified."
That still sounds really stupid to say, especially in an otherwise inexplicable and unneeded video that does nothing to promote anything he's pushing, so to find the reason you need to get into what is not said- or named.
There is no reason to cut a video like this unless you're feeling a need to defend your position. Colville knows that SOBS' Big Move is coming and he knows that it's an all-digital, always-online Walled Garden business model. That's an assertion that there is only one correct way to play the game (theirs), but that's not Colville's only target. He's not brave enough to name the leviathan looming above (SOBS) or the behemoth rumbling beneath his feet (the Bros), but he is hoping to stop what cannot be stopped all the same.
As Jeffro has said elsewhere, "The Elusive Shift never happened. People just stopped playing the game."
That's what this bullshit is really about: justifying Conventional Play and buoying the Cargo Cult thereof in the face of an oncoming existential one-two knockout.
And if Colville thinks the Bros are hardline about this, he should sit his contacts within SOBS down and get them comfortable enough to confess that the Next Edition business plan is itself a push far more hardcore than anything the Bros have said or done to ensure that everyone plays the same game exactly as SOBS dictates. That's what being always-online and all-digital does, and the purpose of a system is what it does.
No, Matt, your commercial plans are fucked. So are those of your fellow Cargo Cult Slop Merchants. Walled Garden, Clubhouse, or Quit- those are your options, and you don't have what it takes to follow SOBS' lead into the digital domain, so that route is closed. You can survive by doing like Chris Gonnerman and making your living elsewhere, but you won't do that and neither with all but a few of your fellow Slop Merchants. More likely is that you'll quit, but that's akin to saying that you're more likely to be crippled than killed in a car crash. This means that the Clubhouse is also closed to you and your ilk because you have to abandon the Cargo Cult to gain admittance, and you can't do that either.
So here you are, trying so hard to do anything about what you know is coming but what will actually work. I won't miss you.
(This video also paints the Boomers in a bad light by implying they are, as a cohort, too fucking retarded to read or write technical manuals for shit. Jesus wept, we are dominated by a generation of narcisstic retarded illiterates.)
To no one's surprise, Sorcerors By The Sea (SOBS) has nothing but hatred and contempt for the men who made their business possible.
DnD creators, Gygax and others, are erased and slandered at the same time.
WoTC and Hasbro just released the new Players Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, as well at the 40th Anniversary "Making of DnD" book whose foreward slams the original creators and attempts to distance… pic.twitter.com/m0Fv0fbZVf
As I explained elsewhere, years ago now, the process of conquest involves changing the mythology of the conquered to conform to the conquerors' will. This deliberate defamation and denigration of Gygax in particular and Arneson by association is exactly the sort of demoralization that conquerors do to break the will of the conquerered.
This, like with BRIDGE and the DIE Regime and the SJWs in OldPub and the Hellmouth, is all a plan to play the long game. It's a Fabian strategy to coopt the next generation into becoming adherants of the conquerors' cult, and thereby complete their conquest and cement their control.
That SOBS is forced to maintain easy availability of the older versions of the game is a tacit admission that this plan is in trouble, probably an inevitable failure, which has got to played into the decision for the Big Move: it's easier to execute the Skinsuit-Demoralize-Replace strategy in a digital medium and with a digital business model.
Therefore take these moves not as a flex of power, but a virtue signal of weakness; if they could have thrown Gygax and his work down the Memory Hole, they would have now as they had 25 years to do it and they failed. To a lesser extent, this also applies to the Realms (despite Greenwood being a Fellow Traveler) and Krynn.
Across the board, the creators or their heirs have not taken this lying down. Good. So long as that respect for the men who made this hobby possible endures, that final victory cannot be had and thus it can all be undone.
SOBS can't do this in the Clubhouse, and it is from the Clubhouse that the hobby shall rebuild anew after SOBS is gone.
