Dunder Moose talks Trek and Braunstein tonight.
"Can you 'Stein the Prime Directive? Stee and his crew come on This Is Dunder Moose to talk about their interstellar action!"
The answer is "Yes, you can" because Star Trek, no matter what version you use- and yes, that is a question and has been since FASA Trek co-existed with Starfleet Battles and its extrapolations of the original series.
I will be in the chat, as I want to hear how this is going down. See you all there.
There's something else that needs to be kept in mind when we talk about how Vidya beats Tabletop for a lot of adventure game stuff.
Vidya, for certain games so far, does a far better job realizing how a man in that environment has to think and act to succeed than on Tabletop. The game that illustrates this best is BattleTech. Both the Harebrained Schemes adaptation and the Pirahna Games one handle all of the actual campaign stuff better than tabletop because it's shoved into the faces of the typical player; you have to master logistics to win the game.
Notice that both of these games have their own ways of doing Conventional Play's disregard of Strict Timekeeping because both of these are single-player games with no pressure upon them by hostile actors; they are both games with Narrative at their core, so you have to trip Plot Triggers for things to happen that matter- just like Conventional Play.
When you go to an Open World mode of play (which both of these videos do), even that is gone. You can do all the refits, train up pilots, go wherever, and the only costs that matter are time and (sometimes) availability. Yes, this is exactly same thing as the old joke about JRPGs where you have to Save The World Right Now, but you spent as much or more time doing sidequests than the main quest because that's where much or most of the game is.
As JD Sauvage said on Twitter the other day, Operational Tempo matters. Conventional Play does not have this. It cannot because it is taken as Referee cheating players, and due to several infamous episodes that got turned into comic strips and running jokes there is substance to that seeming.
Pressure comes from outside the player. Want your man to get that loot in the dungeon? Got to get down there and grab it before some other man does, and that someone else is run by a player- not a NPC run by the Referee.
That player can be you, as you may be forced to bench your first choice man due to what goes down at the table and have to resort to a backup choice to secure that bag instead. (Get used to the idea of having a roster of mans when you play in a real campaign, rotating them on and off the bench as required.)
That player can also be someone else, whom you do not know, and you will not know until that treasure is taken or otherwise removed from the campaign and thus no longer relevant.
That's how things really work when you play a real tabletop adventure game, and you play it in a proper campaign environment. It will not feel like a Narrative; it is not play-acting. It will feel like war, like business- like the competition that it is. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose- and sometimes you win or lose for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
And the experience is vital to achieving the full power of the tbletop adventure game as a medium.
Playing Uncle George's Space Opera is piss-easy. I will link you to the most recent post on it.
West End Games is long dead, but its games of note (d6 Star Wars and TORG) endure on used bookstores and game shops around the world, and the former in particular maintains an active online archive of official and unofficial material (starting with the unofficial edition of the game).
Combined with the disgust that Kulty Kathy induced in the fans of Uncle George's Space Opera, you saw an uptick in support for the d6 version of the game despite it being dead before The Phantom Menace released.
"But I can't stand the brand anymore. That was our last hope."
In addition to Traveller (which can do this just fine, and definitely discourages needless violence), Spacemaster (Rolemaster ruleset retooled for Space Adventures), and Star Frontiers (which has the mood, but not the specific substance), there is another forgotten game that is meant for this stuff.
(Note: Please don't buy from DriveThru; if the publisher allows direct sales as is the case for Space Opera do that instead.)
Long before West End got the license from Uncle George to make the official RPG in 1987, there were people filing off the serial numbers to make something that could do it but not get them into legal troubles. Certain other games also serve well to fulfill this function such as Mekton Zeta.
(Star Trek got this explicitly with Starfleet Battles, and yes you can use the above games for Trek-inspired campaigning also.)
All of this follows a theme: a long disdained/underserved audience learns how to work around the lack of Official Product and ends up recreating old norms, thus making Official Product irrelevant at best.
Do give Space Opera a try. They also made Bushido, which is also worth a try, and some other games that should be given a revisiting in light of their use as ways around corporate gatekeeping.
As the saying goes, "Amateurs study strategy. Professionals study logistics."
Fantastic adventure wargames are no different, and nowhere does this become more obvious right away than when the adventuring scenario involve mechanization.
Be it Traveller, Twilight 2000, RIFTS, Robotech, Mechwarrior/A Time of War, Battlelords of the 23rd Century, TORG, Heavy Gear/Jovian Chronicles/Gear Krieg, Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, etc. you have a milieu where adventures rely on using tools that have significant wear and tear just from intended use as well as consumables like fuel and munitions.
What does this mean? It means that there is an implied economic element to successful play, economics means logistics, and logistics (a) means mandatory downtime and self-generating scenarios for gameplay.
Guns need ammunition. Explosives (including missiles and rockets) need to be replaced. Machines need repairs, great and small alike, which means parts (etc.) need to be sourced and labor employed in spaces capable of allowing (if not improved to facilitate) such work- shops, factories, yards, etc. Vehicles (and some other things) need fuel and have limited range.
The stupid thing to do is to ignore all of this. Conventional play ignores all of this because players whine about it being inconvenient. Conventional play is stupid.
There are ways to handle this.
The title is misleading. This is really a recap of the Battle of the Atlantic in World War 2, dominated by German U-boats vs. Allied surface and aerial assets.
Indy talks a lot about technology and doctrine, but I can put it simply: the Allies forced the Germans into killzones and pounced upon them. The bait were the convoys and all the goods needed for the United Kingdom to stay in the fight. The killzones were the spaces created between the bait and the escorts, complimented in time by intelligence provided by aerial reconnaisance and signals intelligence intercepts.
It took a lot for this to come together, but the results speak for themselves and if such a similar situation were to arise now you would expect to have all of these elements reassert themselves swiftly to recreate those killboxes and replicate those results.
Therefore, I ask you this question: put in the position of someone looking to do commerce raiding to drive an enemy power out of the fight, and with this history informing your actions, what do you do to avoid this scenario repeating itself?
It's an interesting scenario question, isn't it? Now apply all of this to your campaign--even fantasy games, since they have stealth and piracy is a thing--and you see where I'm going with this. The historical record often has fantastic events in its pages, events that are going to come up organically in your own fantastic adventure gaming and fiction, and the different trappings don't change the fundamentals.
Imagine, for example, that you're playing in Jeffro's Trollopolous and you want to bring a hostile city-state to heel. Choking off the trade that supplies it with what it cannot produce itself is part of a siege campaign, and that's what the Battle of the Atlantic was. Imagine that you're playing a Macross campaign; you're going to want to find out how the enemy is supplying itself with the food, men, and material that it requires to wage war against your heroic Valkyrie squadrons and the idol singers that love them. You can be the First Lord of the Star League, the Emperor of the Galactic Empire, Warchief of the Horde, or a free captain on the Sea of Stars who's skull banner means freedom, dealing with this scenario in this manner is the same process.
Therefore, regardless of what genre your scenario claims to be in, you are dealing with the same things. If you can answer the above hypothetical in real world terms, you can answer it in any fictional context. This is why the better fiction writers always have a handle on real world history and current events, and make reading about it part of their routine; it makes the fiction better by providing it with the vital substance of reality without the drudgery that often comes with it.
And that is why real RPGs--real gaming--as the #BROSR lays out--is the real hobby; real gaming is wargaming.
I'm taking this Pop Cult video as a jumping off point for a very common Space Opera problem: Bad Scaling.
That's a lot of cope. It's this simple: most writers have no clue what they're talking about. Uncle George has real limits that his chosen medium imposes, reinforced further by deadlines and financial constraints, but novelists and comic authors do not.
The sort of "major fleet action" that constitutes climatic battles marking the apex of a narrative arc in Uncle George's Space Opera (and the Mouse Wars knock-offs) are skirmishes in E.E. Smith's Lensman series and Yoshiki Tanaka's Legend of the Galactic Heroes. By the time those series reach narrative peaks, we're looking at hundreds of thousands or millions of capital ships per side with tens or hundreds of millions of combatants.
That is the sort of scale that truly epic Space Opera requires, and very few authors even comprehend what that is- nevermind how it would work or what two competing forces of that size and scale would do to defeat the other. Uncle George, and others in his sphere like Battlestar Galactica (both versions), didn't even try- and George, at most, implied it was possible.
The problem is that these writers fail to see that combat--at any scale, from man-to-man all the way up to universal scale--is nothing more (in narrative terms) than a stage to develop character and advance plot. The difference is that you do so by action--what someone does and how they do it--instead of by dialog. In film or comic terms, this leads to the ideal of a scene where the entire narrative unfolds without a single word or grunt uttered; all character development, and plot advancement, occur silently.
This, by the way, is hardly impossible. Ryan vs. Dorkman did this on a lark 16 years ago, and you'll see others with experience in stunt work or fight choreography do short films like that on the regular- both to stay in practice and to add to their film reels for big boy work.
And no, Hellmouth and OldPub writers as a class don't do Git Gud so they won't put in the work required to make their Space Opera better. They rely on nepotism and corruption to get paid, just like their fellow travelers elsewhere in the Death Cult, so you're going to have to go old-school, go Indie, or go East to get your eyeballs on stuff that doesn't suck.
Lueten09 dropped another massive 40K lore video the other day. This is, as usual, pro-level audiobook stuff. If you're a fan, have at it. For the rest of us, skip below.
Lueten09's lore videos, the BattleTech lore Black Pants Legion does, and more like that are evidence that making pro-quality audiobook w/ visual accompanyment (and yes, I say it that way because you don't need the visuals; it's icing on the cake, not part of the cake itself) is no longer prohibitively expensive save in terms of time. This is a big deal, and I'm going to spell it out for you.
I am dead-ass serious when I say that Catalyst Game Labs, Games Workshop, et. al., ought to be cutting these lore channels fat checks for doing their marketing for them. This is time spent, as a hobby, putting together professional-grade productions that attract and retain audiences that then go on to spend real money on the corporate property that these channels promote via their hobby-done lore videos.
Maybe you're a writer. Maybe you do comics. Whatever you've created, if you're making a property--regardless of its medium or product category of origin--that has this sort of lore quality attached to it then you really ought to be thinking about making use of those massive notes that otherwise gets made into content for a wiki and then forgotten about.
These lore videos demonstrates that what formerly was the exclusive domain of Big Corporate entertainment is not any longer. As with merchandise and tie-in products, small indie creators can now pursue these options and add more value to their creative output and extend that long tail even longer so that what you produce today still pays you years down the line (and, hopefully, becomes passive income for your heirs).
This means that you no longer need to sell out. You can keep full ownership of what you create and still exploit it to full effect, and that should scare the hell out of Big Corporate if they were at all paying attention- which they aren't.
To appropriate the enemy's language, you now have full access to the means of production. What are you going to do with it?
Things got you wound up? Need something stupid to laugh at? Eckhart's Ladder--the most fanboyish of fan channel for Space Wizard Fun Time--has you covered.
Of the complaints made here, only one doesn't play: "there are too many superweapons".
We're talking a galaxy-sized setting. Space Is Big. There are too few superweapons, not too many, and the galaxy is stupidly under-populated even for the agranian worlds. A galaxy-spanning civilization, even one riven by competing states, will nontheless be measured in the hundreds of trillions in population and should be expected to field Death Stars as if they were Star Destroyers (and Star Destroyers as if they were actual destroyers and not battleship/carrier hybrids).
This sort of thing is what E.E. Smith--the father of Space Opera--got right with the Lensmen series, and man did the super-weapons in that series get crazy: trans-galactic railguns using dead planets as ammo, weaponizing entire stars as super-lasers, planet-sized webs that disintegrated what they touched, and so on. Compared to what he wrote, the super-weapons of both Western and Eastern Space Opera in comics, film, and television is often pathetic.
(Note: You have to start thinking in terms of Getter Emperor, Mazinger Zero, Ideon, the Third Impact, fully-powered Zeorymer, Super Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann/Super Anti-Spiral, etc. to get on Smith's level. Iserlohn and Geiserberg from Legend of the Galactic Heroes are entry-level efforts by any galaxy-spanning civilization worth a damn.)
And that's before we start talking biological weapons. That's when things really get nasty.
Today I'm revisiting Axanar the pro-quality Star Trek fan film that Paramount stupidly decided to screw over years ago. Hollywood veteran Robert Burnett was involved, and he put out a series of videos talking about the very thing that got Paramount's attention: the SFX shots. He put them into a short playlist and I want you folks to see it and listen to his commentary:
My creative work, for now, is prose and prose is not any visual medium. That's intended to change down the road, and there are some of you who do work--or want to work-in a visual medium like film. Just as professional wrestling has a form of visual storytelling they call "match psychology", so does film and television (live or animated) and Rob here shows that he understands this very well- as one expects of a competent industry veteran.
You won't hear him say it, but you see that he also knows where the line between any semblance of fidelity to known science and the demands of good drama are in science fiction. That's not hyperbole; you can, literally, see it in these videos. Sure, it's absurd to think that capital ships will dodge and weave like fighters in a dogfight, but that approach makes it easier to put forth a dramatic presentation in the small-scale engagements this film focuses upon.
I enjoy hearing Rob talk about how he would time the cut-aways to the characters reacting and issuing orders in turn for maximum dramatic effect. That's him displaying that he gets what visual media are good at doing: showing, viscerally, the consequences of actions. The actors would then use body language and tone of voice as short-hand to convey what a prose rendition of the scene would spend time going into a character's head to expose and display; seconds on screen versus pages read in prose.
You can hear in Rob's voice the lament for what could have--should have--been. While the project is being salvaged so the time spent and the money raised actually produces some tangible results, it's clear that this is akin to Blizzard's salvaging of the ill-fated "Titan" MMORPG to produce Overwatch. Hopefully this instance will not produce that same disappointment, as film and TV is not videogames (something else people forget), but episodic psuedo-TV is not a proper feature-length film and everyone knows it.
At least what was finished won't go to waste. What comes out of the final result will still blow people away with what can be done by small-scale parties now. Soon, and sooner than you think, this power will be accessible to common people working out of their homes at working-man prices. When that hits, you can kiss Hollywood's chokehold on the media in the West goodbye.
You can keep up for yourself via the Axanar channel on YouTube or their website.
The following thread, posted last night, is the most accurate diagnosis of Star Trek as a franchise that I've seen. Reposted with edits for clarity. Original Twitter thread is here.
So, the proper way to view Trek is that Star Trek, more than many other shows, is meant to be a mirror through which Liberalism views itself. It is the Liberal ideal projected out into a future where they have achieved all their ideals and built their perfect society.
So TOS is a Space Adventure story, where a heroic man (and his companions) travel through an unknown and sometimes hostile galaxy, fighting villains and having adventures as they impose the Liberal Ideal on the galaxy at large. This is Heroic Liberalism.
TNG is a story about the Post-Liberal Society, where the Liberal hero is a thinking man, a diplomat and (unwilling) warrior who has to come to terms with living alongside other civilizations.
Other civilizations, which are unwilling to see the wisdom of accepting the Liberal Ideal and dismantling their prior civilizations. They obviously do this from ignorance.
That's the basis of all of TNG's ethical dilemnas, especially those that deal with Klingons/Romulans/Cardassians.
DS9 comes in here too, because DS9 is the story of what that Liberal Utopia does when the other civilizations won't just accept that Liberalism is obviously the best and try to fight against it.
DS9 also the best show because it doesn't shy away from depicting the Federation as just another Empire, like any other, that wants to expand its territory and assimilate its neighbors
This speech is one of the best in the show for this very reason:
So, given these priors and that these shows were wildly celebrated, why is modern Trek (STD, PIC, and Lower Decks) such hot garbage, when they have such excellent source material? Because Modern Liberalism is bankrupt.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the "End of History", Liberalism achieved all of its stated principles and proved it could outcompete anybody.
Did this herald an age of transcendence and wisdom where men shed the human condition and became Enlightened Beings beyond the ken of their ancestors? Well...
So, this necessarily causes an identity crisis. The result of that identity crisis is not to think about it, and to lose yourself in the unprecedented prosperity of the age to avoid answering the question.
Which is why Discovery is all about people behaving in absurdly modern fashion to their problems, Picard is all about how much they hate Modernity (even though they made it, because they were promised that Liberalism would solve all the problems and still nobody's happy).
And Lower Decks is ultimately a Nihilistic Fantasy about adults behaving like dumb children and laughing at fart/sex jokes because making jokes about anything else is too problematic. The humor is repetitive, though it will probably draw a laugh or two if you watched it.
Cause regardless of what we think and do, we're still trapped in Liberal World. And Liberal World is a Utopian vision that lived long enough to outlast its Utopia.
Enterprise is the early stages of Liberal navel-gazing, post-Victory, and trying to reckon with the reality of the world they see.
Their first thought wasn't "well, we did it, but the world is still fucked, let's just be hedonists", they first had to do "Well, we did it, but the world isn't quite right...did we miss a step?"
SO they look back and, through their own retrospective, they see their victory as an inevitable chain of events which led to an inevitable conclusion, like a Scientific reaction (their only mode of viewing events bigger than themselves)
This is why Enterprise isn't an origin story of the First Starship Enterprise, but a story centered around how Non-Liberal Aliens From the Future want to destroy/thwart the Enterprise because, if they do that, the Federation will never happen.
You quickly see that, if the Enterprise does what it's fated to do (according to Future History), that the Federation will come about as an inevitable result. No free will, no possible alternate path, it has to happen this exact way.
The show even ends with the Finale being a simulation on the TNG Enterprise, where Riker is watching the final journey of Enterprise-A, and ends with him and Troi sitting down to watch Archer's big speech, remarking "This is where the Federation was Born."
(This line of thinking eventually makes you tear down statues or begin doubting the importance of any one figure, because you see history as an inevitable response by the masses of men to large unseen forces that just happen because reasons)
Voyager is, like always, a bit of an odd duck in this context, because the question it asks removes one of the key elements of the other shows. It's less holding up a mirror than it is asking a more focused hypothetical: "What would a bunch of Liberals do away from Liberal Land?"
So you have Liberal Utopia ship Voyager so far away from home that they'll practically never see anything or anyone they knew ever again, surrounded by cultures they've never heard of and threats which they'd never have heard of from the furthest-flung alien visitor...what do?
And, well, judging by the show itself, it's "muddle our way through 7 seasons, let Janeway violate every Liberal precept in the name of survival one episode, then let her chastise anyone who even thinks of doing the same in like, the next fucking episode"
That show also can't manage to produce any good characters, because by the time it came out Liberalism had become bored with the ideas that would give you an Oddyseus-like Hero (The perfect model for a ship captain on a trip far from home)
And that paints the lie of Liberalism: Without the force of the State behind it, it has no real meaning. It gets abandoned when its inconvenient and used to bash someone over the head when it works.
(Now, this can be said of any governing philosophy to some extent, but I mean only that Liberalism is especially divorced from the Natural World and observable reality.)
Like, you wash up someone who's a Monarchist or a Fascist on a deserted island, he most likely has a skill or two that will help him survive, because he learned them at some point in his life cause he realized he's part of nature and wants to see what that's all about.
His worldview doesn't divorce him from Reality, so his curiosity if nothing else makes him learn more about it and what might be required to survive in it. Modern Liberalism is all about creating an artificial world to avoid thinking about Reality, cause Reality suuuuucks.
TLDR: Trek mirrors Liberalism's rise and fall, exposing it as a pernicious cult that only worked because the State backs it and doesn't when the State cannot or does not.
This is how the Death Cult--and make no mistake, Liberalism is a Death Cult--worked and works here and now, today, and it is telling that only the parodies truly capture the spirit that Trek aimed for but rarely achieved (and when it did, it did so by betraying the Cult), while the most poignant Trek stories are the criticism of what it champions. (See the video above for a good example.)
My fellow cultural dissidents who are working to topple this Death Cult from its cultural high ground need to read this analysis and consider it carefully. That is the dream we're sold, and what becomes of it when it reaches hegemony. Because it cannot continue without consuming others, it inevitably turns to consume itself; the rapid descent via decadence and degeneracy into open Satanism is the beast consuming itself to continue as it cannot find new lands to migrate to and corrupt/assimilate/despoil to feed itself.
Nevermind for a moment the way Hollywood works. That's for another post. Consider this in terms of what we can, currently, combat and that's storytelling- narrative.
Make no mistake. Roddenberry was an idealist and he put his ideals into both Trek series he ran, front and center in many cases, and through his work sold generations on the false promises of a secular Liberal hegemony. He put in the work--and it wasn't easy--to get his vision on television and movie screens, and through that work he inspired masses to take those ideals into their lives and implement them. Some went into STEM fields, some into academia, while others just did it on the job and voted that way over time. The seed that lead to SJWs and Corporate Cancer may not have started here, but it sure did stopover here and take on fuel.
The way that we cut this cancer out is to attack its narrative premises. Take a good look again at that video; now imagine crafting a narrative that attacks the premises of Liberalism and building an entertaining story around that narrative. That's exactly what our enemies did to us, since popular literature arose in the West, as they used this very thing to spread their cancer. The culture sets the frame. The frame sets the politics. Narrative Warfare is all about the Frame Game.
And like it or not, the Frame Game is what winning the culture war is about. This is why optics are important; they are about Frame, and Frame is about Narrative.
The people currently running Trek into the ground, those that are not merely incompetent, are driving their false front into the arms of their true master via this very manipulation. When Doomcock cries about how Lower Decks is all about Mocky Spock getting away Mary Sue style with shitting all over the norms not only of Starfleet and the Federation, but of any functional organization of any sort, he's crying about the Narrative pushed that supports the Death Cultists pushing the corporate cancer we see at corporations like Goodyear and the normalization of pedophilia at Netflix as well as not blinking an eye at Antifa infiltration of primary schools across the country.
Attack the frame by attacking the narrative. That's within our power. We--and we alone--must be the ones telling the world our stories about ourselves. We have failed to do so, in large part because we didn't even recognize that this is what happened until now. Now our enemies--who seek our obliteration--tell those stories, so they tell us stories where who and what we are is always wrong even if it defies logic and reason and doesn't hold up to reality. (Again, e.g. Lower Decks) The consequences, if not challenged, will be lemmings lead over the edge to the maw of an ever-hungry Enemy to devour us whole.
We already have some sense of what needs to be done: relentlessly promote and cross-promote allies and friends, drive a hungry audience to what we offer, and satisfy their unfulfilled desires for something other than the Death Cult poison. It's time to ramp things up.
FanTube, I'm talking to YOU. Doomcock, Nerdrotic, Geeks & Gamers, Midnight's Edge, That Star Wars Girl, Heelsvsbabyface- all of you. Listen up.
Your conception of the SJW problem is wrong. You are consistently baffled at how the Woke Brigade go from failure to failure and only fail upward. This reason is because you made the same mistake that others have made for over 30 years in various hobby niches, as explained by author Brian Niemeier below:
The truth is that a cabal of fanatics has been working day and night to infiltrate the entertainment industry and pervert it into a propaganda machine. They've been at it for decades, and now nearly all major studios and publishers bow the knee to the Cult's high priests.
You'd be forgiven for mistaking these screencapped tweets from a self-described game creator for the scribblings on a lunatic asylum inmate's walls. The inability to discern reality from fantasy used to be a symptom of psychosis. Now it gets you a cushy sinecure pretending to make art while gibbering on Twitter.
You couldn't ask for a better example of Death Cult doctrine in practice. The Cult's central tenet is that any limit on personal expression, even reality, is oppressive and must be destroyed. A lot of people assume it's hyperbole to say that the Cult wants to destroy reality, which is odd because the Cultists' own public professions constantly refute that assumption.
That's why claims of the entertainment industry pushing anti-normal person agitprop for profit ring false. The Cultists in charge of our entertainment are laboring under a form of self-induced schizophrenia. They really believe that casting cape flicks with disabled lesbian Eskimo Wiccans will usher in an earthly paradise free of straight, white, Christian men.
Go ahead, read that again after you listen to Doomcock rant about how Doctor Who's recent season was nothing less than wholesale cultural despoiling and defilement.
You made a wholesale category error and it's come back to bite you good and hard in the ass, FanTube.
The Death Cult is not an aberration in an otherwise functional business. It's a Satanic anti-religion that's gained power across ALL institutions--public and private--in the West, and it's very reason for being is to defile and destroy all that gives live meaning and purpose. They revel in taking power over your shows, your comics, your toys, your games and ruining them so thoroughly that you quit them in disgust. They use their power in media and tech to control what you see and hear, following a playbook refined by their predecessors.
my God, man, you’re not supposed to *say* it pic.twitter.com/PRQZQIDBJP
— David Hines (@hradzka) April 27, 2020
This is why Narrative Warfare is a thing. The SJWs are obsessed with controlling information, and that control not only includes what you receive, but also what you produce, and to do that requires controlling both the flow of information as well as what flows through them. You cannot act on thoughts that you do not have.
Yes, they do use 1984 as an instruction manual. They also use Rules For Radicals, so read that also. The combination results in things like this recent #orcposting flareup; it's a Humiliation Ritual, where they know what they say is bullshit, but by making you go along with it--in any fashion, however slight--they know that they're flexing on you, demonstrating their power, and thereby setting the frame by which all discourse is enacted.
And that's what propaganda controls: The Frame Game.
You buy into their framing of the issue when you accept their terms, however implicit, via attempting logical argumentation- be it Dialetic or Rhetorical. They don't care; they can and will be total bad-faith shitters in order to maintain control over the frame, constantly making you adjust to their shifting of goalposts, knowing that onlookers are inclined to see this as them flexing on you and therefore being in power over you. The result? They win the fight that matters, and you're wondering yet again why Culty Kathy hasn't been guillotined yet.
Until you accept the truth about the problem, you cannot resist it; you can only mire yourself further.
This is why you don't engage SJWs in argument. You shitpost at them, relentlessly and mercileessly. It's about the Frame Game, and only if you control the frame do you have any chance at beating them.
And if you want to start getting a handle on the matter in more detail, buy Brian's new book at Amazon; ebook and paperback is available. For more reading on SJWs, see the Comments.
Dictor von Doomcock, Future Ruler of Earth, cut another video on the other space opera train wreck going.
I mentioned previously that Doomcock is the most self-aware of the Pop Cult channels as to what the Pop Cult is, albeit from the inside, and the language is the tell. This comes up again here, and not just in his use of the language, but that of what he criticizes. In character, the religious language aforementioned gets used in the specific mode we're often talking about with regard to the Pop Cult.
The timestamp for his talk of mythology, and the show's in-character usage of it, is here. Doomcock's laying out that this show, as with everything else tied to Bad Robot, is a specific Narrative Warfare campaign to destroy this alt-mythology Pop Cult sect and its idols. He sees this as a deliberate act of malice, and he's not wrong; it is, and the use of incompetent writers is the praxis of malice- you deliberately put two-bit hacks into position because they'll fuck it up.
Now it makes sense, doesn't it? Those in the Death Cult who are running the Pop Cult deliberately demolish these idols to induce despair, and when vulnerability is greatest they move in like the cult recruiters they are and pull an emotion-targeting attack to indoctrinate the Pop Cultist and bring them fully into the Death Cult as the answer that relieves the pain of their Pop Cult being destroyed. Mouse Wars, Marvel/DC, videogames, etc. all use this playbook: the Pop Cult is the honeypot, then the front is demolished and because the Pop Cultist has nothing real to fall back on they are left open to being preyed upon and pulled into the Death Cult in full to relieve the grief.
This? This is malice. The incompetence is the method used, nothing more; those hacks are as disposable as the audience to the cult. The Mammon Mob is there to provide cover from the other end of society while financing operations, even if they sometimes take control from the Death Cult because the Cult threatens to ruin their business, but ultimately it too serves the ends of the Cult.
The last few weeks have seen leaks of information about that Big Brand franchise with the laser swords and the moon-sized space stations that SJWs took over and promptly ran into the ground. Last night that franchise's final film in its first trilogy after the Devil Mouse acquired it premiered. It is exactly as you expected. When the man who created it wasn't even there, you know it's bad.
And the bloodsuckers in Corporate know it. Already the Crazy Cat Lady that drove this franchise into the ground has been sidelined and that streaming exclusive series meant to be both a sop and a cope is by the regime set to replace her openly in the near future. In short, Corporate saw that Cat Lady is responsible for damaging their investment and moved to repair it. That doesn't mean we'll get a full restoration. It just means that Corporate knows what the boundary conditions are now and will color within those lines.
There is hope. Some of the fan channels are finally getting it: stop giving money to people who hate you. The problem is that their perception of who hates them, and why, is limited to the Cat Lady and her SJW Death Cult bullshit. They don't see that Corporate itself is the problem. Smart Corporate stewardship can keep the known destructive elements of corporate ownership in check and produce great stuff. (e.g. Gundam, which has far more good than bad in its catalog, especially between 2011-2020.) The Devil Mouse ain't smart.
Yes, even though I like two of the men set to take over operations--and one of the being the creator's last protege, responsible for the pre-takeover animated entries being decent if not good--and the woman is not a cat lady, the reason for skepticism is not due to the Death Cult per se. It's due to the fact that this is a corporate investment by a global corporation, and not an act of authentic creation by the creator or under his supervision. There is good reason to believe the suck will continue, just shorn of SJW BS.
It's going to be a work, folks. I've been saying in for a while now, and so have my colleagues: Walk away from the Devil Mouse. Walk away from Paramount (or whatever it's called this week). The corporate regimes may stop actively trashing those Big Brands, but only insofar as it means repairing their investments and making them meet the heavy expectations for Return On Investment put to them. Let me repeat that: Only insofar as it means meeting Return On Investment expectations.
They don't care about you. Corporations are psychopaths, and IP are means to an end and nothing more- making you, the audience, nothing more than revenue streams to tap. Yes, it's nice to not have Clown World smeared into your face on a daily basis by SJWs, but you're still being farmed via your emotional bond to a brand like cult leaders exploit their cultists.
That's not respectful conduct, and to quote Doomcock: Without Respect, We Reject. Unless and until a non-creator owner demonstrates by deeds that respect, walk away.
And that's why the time for #BrandZero has come.
The World Class Bullshitters had a Veteran's Day Special the other night, featuring independent author Yakov Merkin among the current and former military men as guests of the show. Lots of wide-ranging conversations to be had here, and well worth the four hours spent. You know you're going to run into some downtime today, so queue this one up and give it a go.
The World Class Bullshitters are on fire right now. In this livestream below, they spend over two hours shooting the shit with the one and only RAZORFIST!
You better believe that they talked Mouse Wars and other pop-culture black holes of suck and blow, in the manner of two guys with whiskey in hand shooting the shit around a campfire at the end of a long day. I have no need to spend time writing about what's in this podcast, and you have no need to waste your time reading me trying to see this to you. Just put this on, ignore the dumpster fire that is mainstream TV, and have a hell of a good time with two crews that get on well together.
To no one's surprise, Star Trek: Discovery is a dumpster fire of suck, blow, and fail. The folks at Midnight's Edge held a roundtable discussion on this matter, and you can feel the pain of the stupidity throughout the podcast. Listen to this instead of watching the NFL tonight.
The divide between the audience opinion on STD and the "critics" is also not a surprise. Critics in the Fake Media are Fake Journalists that produce Fake (Entertainment) News to serve the Narrative over the people. The anticipated reactions by CBS, Paramount, and other stakeholders are also not surprises. At this point, it's down to when this crash hits- not if it does. I join the chorus on how to handle this in the moment: shit-can this Fake Trek in favor of The Orville. Seth's take isn't perfect, but it is faithful, and that's why his show is Real Trek.
We lost Axanar for STD. Never forget. Here, watch "Prelude" again and compare to what STD delivered. RIP Richard Hatch.
Nevermind the legal issues. We can see clearly why CBS/Paramount went after Axanar: it makes STD look like the clown collage crapfest that it is- on a fraction of the budget!
While others lodge commentary and complaints about the dumpster fire that is Star Trek: Discovery, I have a specific complaint to lodge.
I don't want to hear "But her English is accented?" She's fine, perfectly understandable by anyone who isn't a fucking moron. Nor do I want to hear "But she's not well-known." because (a) she does have a following and (b) she's been a leading lady in feature films for decades as well as a supporting player. She's long ago proven that she has the chops to lead a Trek show; hell, she's overqualified.
She's got the talent to become, by merit alone, one of the most beloved players in the history of the franchise. Write her the sort of captain that Starfleet would want to have in its corps of captains, the sort we see implied well in the now-ruined Axanar, and you'd have another generation-defining hit on your hands.
Instead, you waste her on a minor supporting role to set up a protagonist who isn't even captain of the ship she's on, before handing her off to another captain on another ship to do the same thing. This is a show that doesn't get Trek dramatics, and that's before the SJW bullshit that we knew would be part-and-parcel of this cynical production of anti-fun.
If this is how CBS & Paramount treat someone like Yeoh, I can imagine Issacs not being happy either. Christ. Fuck all this for a game of soldiers. Just stick with The Orville, and pray McFarlane doesn't let it suck and waste his opportunity to out-Trek Trek and not get sued into oblvion (as Axanar did).
Recently I posted about a YouTube channel by the name of "Midnight's Edge", as that channel covers the ongoing trainwreck that is the Star Trek franchise and the imminent failure of Star Trek: Discovery. If you haven't checked out that channel and watched their videos on the matter, please do so; the inside baseball alone makes it worthwhile.
Of course I wanted to find one for Star Wars, and--while by no means as informed on the business end as the Midnight's Edge crew--the people at World Class Bullshitters. They're a crude bunch at times, but they are on point. Watch, but not with young kids around.
What got my attention was this video by one of the crew therein talking about how the merchandise is still rotting on the shelves, especially Rey and Finn action figures.
Remember the source of George Lucas' wealth: getting merchandise rights from 20th Century Fox over Star Wars. He had no shame in turning every possible element of the film into something you could be in the store, and we who grew up with it remember that too well. Of course Disney would continue doing that, and--hear me out here--this is a smart idea.
The problem is that you have incompetent twats driven by ideology over data calling the shots. The reason this is not a bad idea is that you can track your merchandise sales to find indicators of what your audience is, what they like, and what they would rather punt down a shaft into the Death Star's reactor. Use that data to improve your product.
I can hear the MBAs going "Basic Bitch Business 101, duh." from here. Guys, Lucasfilm doesn't do this because it's run by cultist ideologues. You'd think the combination of (a) all that Rey merch rotting on the shelves, (b) massive fan hate for Rey, and (c) equally bad mockery of Rey would result in a top-down directive to change fucking course but that's not happening because Lucasfilm's head is a death cultist pushing Muh Feminism as an executive mandate.
In short, you have an irrational business plan being implemented and enforced by an irrational individual working off Muh Feels and not any objective data or other empirical information- other than how to deflect criticism of The Narrative. Comics, games, movies, TV- all the same bullshit, for the same reasons, producing the same results and getting the same reactions: Double-Down! This is textbook insanity, folks, driving by a textbook cult.
And that's why I can only hope that the crash is truly colossal and catastrophic, because nothing less will dislodge the death cult from the franchise so it can be taken up by sober-minded people who know how to run a global media corporation competently. (Yes, that means taking Lucas back on in an advisory capacity; don't force him back in the driver's seat--he's retired, so let him stay there--but listen to him when he talks about his own creation, dammit.)
In the meantime, I encourage everyone who has the skill and the will to do so to fork and replace Star Wars. It's long past time for Alt-Culture to become a thing.
I'd been trawling through YouTube seeing if I could get any useful Trek news, when I hit upon a channel named "Midnight's Edge". This channel covers the ongoing debacle that is CBS's Star Trek: Discovery, and below I'm embedding the video that got my attention. I'll be checking back to see what else this channel puts forth on the matter.
This is the sort of journalism that so-called "journalists" don't bother doing anymore, and haven't for some time. Pay particular attention to their exposure of how the legal restructuring of Viacom, Paramount, and CBS did damage to the ownership of the Trek IP- and the consequences this means for the audience due to the deception-by-omission of these facts and their impact on this series.
Furthermore, pay particular attention to the comparison of the Public Relations strategy regarding criticism and how Paul Feig's big flop (Yes, Fembusters.) attacked that problem. The collusion continues, folks; it never stopped. It just changes implementation, and the talking moves from email lists to cocktail lunches.
Finally, take heart in the confirmation of your suspicions that Discovery is doomed dogshit no one wants- and for the exact reasons you suspected: Convergence to Social Justice wrecked an already-crippled project (Remember Brian Niemeier saying that's how the entryism starts and escalates? Like any disease, it attacks when the target is weak.) Hopefully, The Orville will not be dogshit. (At least with Adrienne Palacki on board it will have something worth watching.)
And, once more, we see that "grim and gritty" is the SJW codephrase for "Make This Suck & Alienate The Audience". Whereas its parody embraces being fun and entertaining first and foremost, which is why people are excited for it and hope it hits big. Forking works.
Now, to successfully fork SocJus Wars and wreck the Mouse Empire.
You know the social mood shifted when high-profile people start punching back against SJWs. William Shatner--yes, The Shatner--has been doing this for some time now. Yesterday, he had a bunch of SJW writers making Pink Slime for The Mouse-occupied Lucasfilm.
Wow. 140 characters won't even scratch the surface of how mistaken you are. They'd love to believe they descended from those of the 60's 🙄 https://t.co/EWaCFDCZrj
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) July 26, 2017
Yes, he punched back at Chuck Wendig. That's not the only SJW doing work for Star Wars that's punched at Shatner, and Shatner--showing that he knows the Internet better than younger folks young enough to be his grandchildren--reveals that he's based by his response. (Oh, and apparently he knows the Three Laws of SJWs by heart also.)
The man visits /pol/. He knows. He's one of the Original Shitlords, and he--like Notch--has Fuck Off (and Fuck You) Money. The more I see him stand up and punch back, the more I respect him. He's able to contradict The Narrative because the consequences that would've befallen him earlier in his life are toothless now. He's anti-fragile, and he knows it; that's why he can speak the truth plainly for all to see and the tsk-tsks fall on deaf ears. Shatner is a secure man.
That's the big thing about how the Narrative Warfare crowd works: the consistent undermining of security, creating anxiety and using it to force compliance. That's why it is fair to call SocJus a death cult: because they look and act like one, and their results are the degradation and death of all they control. (Just look at Twitter's falling fortunes.)
As the Supreme Dark Lord said in the Darkstream tonight, winning is done by being aggressive and relentless against your enemies. The time for grace and nobility is after the fighting is over and the cleanup is done, not before; these are peacetime traits, unsuitable for war. Furthermore, displays of resistance and courage has an infectious quality to them; if one stands up, others will stand up, and then the punchback becomes a dogpile and a beatdown.
Which is what this failure to silence Shatner threatens to do, and the smarter SJWs know it, which is why the follow-up counterpunch to inquire if Lucasfilm and Disney condone such behavior from their employees has weight to it. Once one famous celebrity successfully shuts down a point-and-shriek swarm attack others will follow, and there goes the SJW hold in another part of the culture. The page turns, and with it goes the Narrative.
