Translated:"[Work News] [Sunrise] [Hero Series] to commemorate the 30th anniversary from the start of broadcasting
Start free distribution of 8 series on Sunrise official YouTube channel!!"
That's right, every single TV show in the Brave series will be free to watch on YouTube. But that's not all. Mashin Hero Wataru, featured in Super Robot Wars X, is also free to watch- and it's available NOW, SUBTITLED!
This is a promotion for the upcoming remake of the series, but hey this stuff still holds up. Boy's Own Isekai Adventure w/ Magic & Mecha. Queue up the playlist and enjoy!
Of all the fan channels, Doomcock comes closest to grasping awareness of what the Pop Cult is from the inside (i.e. by being one): it's a replacement religion.
He openly calls the Death Cult's deliberate destruction of the idols of the Pop Cult "destruction of our myths and culture", and this is one such video where that's what he's on about, and he is not wrong.
Doomcock, given the limits of the Pop Cult, sees clearest of all of them so far. He clearly and unambiguously calls the deeds of the Death Cult running popular culture in the West what it is: the deliberate denigration of a culture as an Act of Conquest.
Like it or not, there is only one effective response a Pop Cultist can give to this, and it is this response that makes them vulnerable to escaping the Pop Cult:
That's right: declare the Woke Shit to be HERESY, and thereby repudiate it.
This is what they have to do to avoid the goal of the Death Cult's destruction of the cult's idols: to demoralize them enough to make joining the Death Cult the only way to make the pain of despair bearable.
I put it to you that those in the Pop Cult can be reached. If they can reach where Doomcock is, then they can be brought the rest of the way.
Author David V. Stewart did a review of Kull: Exile of Atlantis, a collection of American literary legend Robert E. Howard's pre-Conan stories featuring the hero Kull.
I have a copy of this volume, as I have every volume in this series, and I can confirm everything Stewart says in his review. This is a fantastic volume, well worth buying a physical copy of and putting into your private library. You will be able to see where Howard got the ideas that would ultimately become Conan the Cimmerian, how that voice would develop, and yet this character--Kull--would remain separate and distinct from Conan.
Howard's conception of Atlantis is very much a proto-Aquilonia, with Kull already on the throne as a successful usurper, and many of his adventures concern threats to his rule. Many of the supernatural elements here show the influence of his penpal, contemporary, and colleague H.P. Lovecraft. This is most obvious in the crossover story (also featuring Bran Mac Morn), "Kings of the Night", wherein Kull falls into a dream that takes him ages in time forward to Bran's Roman-occupied England and Kull assists Bran in a battle of many rebellious barbarian tribes against the Romans. Both kings are served by a mystic/sorcerer sharing the same name, implying it is the same man, so we're following the Dreamlands segment of Lovecraft's Weird Fiction mythos and not so much the squamous stuff he's famous for.
Get this entire series of pure Howard fiction. If Kull isn't your favorite, chances are that you'll find Bran Mac Morn, Solomon Kane, Conan, El Borak, Black Turlough, or yet another of his characters to be your huckleberry. This is brilliant stuff, and as with Lovecraft and Tolkien it's clear that Howard was far more talented than he let on in life and did far more work that most perceived before he killed himself. Two-Gun Bob is an American treasure, a literary legend, and his works--his works, not the pastiches and hackups--should be read by everyone serious about keeping good fiction alive for the future.
Last night friend of the Retreat, and editor, and colleague Brian Niemeier appeared on the SuperversiveSF Podcast to talk about Combat Frame XSeed: CY40 Second Coming, writing, mecha, and all that good stuff.
That good stuff includes announcements regarding the future of the series, by the way, so that alone makes this an hour or so of podcast fun time for you. Turn on Chat Replay so you can find the links to stuff Brian mentions over the course of the episode.
This is going to be a good year for NewPub mecha fiction.
The big take-away here is that a Backer perk Brian first made use of--"Build-a-Mech"--has proven to be a fantastic success for engagement by the audience. Yakon Merkin's taken the concept forward for his Galaxy Ascendant series with backer-designed starships, and both Rawle Nyanzi and I have taken notice. My future campaign will have this perk available, and I am aiming to have at least four slots available.
"The Shadowcast continues exploring the origins of The Dark Avenger with his first appearances on Film and Radio! 1937's THE SHADOW STRIKES... and Orson Welles' first appearance as The Shadow in DEATH HOUSE RESCUE!"
And yes, of course I'm embedding the episode.
I love listening to Razorfist talk about The Shadow like this. The time he takes to get his information, line up his notes, and do his presentation is not trivial. This is how you make use of history for the masses; this is how you take the past and make it something people want to know. You put the past into a present context, and Razorfist did this by (a) making the consistent assertion of The Shadow being Batman's predecessor and superior (done here once) and (b) showing how The Shadow's past prominence made the present pop culture complex possible by demonstrating proof of concept.
That's not Razorfist's explicit goal in this episode, but that is what is shown. Because this podcast series builds on his first two previousvideos on the character, it's presumed that you're familiar with what's said therein. This episode focuses on fleshing out the explosion of the presence of The Shadow beyond the pulp magazine that originated the enterprise, with asides to stillborn attempts to do so, and not so much on others' creative theft of the same or the collapse of that presence after the 1950s.
I hope these come out more often, with a maximum frequency of the magazine itself: bi-weekly. Monthly would do, given all else Razorfist does for his channels as well as making time for what he does away from the camera, but nonetheless I'm looking forward to the next episode. Good podcast series here, folks; subscribe and so on.
This is the sort of cynical bullshit I ranted about yesterday in action. You have to use a Borrowed Power mechanic to participate in the new raid, or you gimp your raid team into the ground. As per the article, this matters only on the last two bosses, but those two bosses (a) drop the best loot and (b) are requirements for raid-specific Achievements and their own rewards. You can't cheese it either; your man get instantly mind-controlled into a hostile and murderous NPC the second you start the fight, so the raid has to kill your man and you don't quality for loot or Achievements because you were--for all intents and purposes--a trash mob NPC and not a player-character.
So what do you have to do to get that cloak? Getting the cloak itself is just tedious bitchwork; do the series of quests and unlocks the new patch content and you get the new cloak as a reward. However, the gotcha here is why you need the cloak: the Sanity mechanic on the boss fights. This works just like the new Horrific Visions and Lesser Visions scenarios, meaning that running these two--especially the former--not only powers-up your cloak, but also increases your cloak's resistance to Corruption and Sanity loss; the more you do this not-raid stuff, the less of a boat anchor you are to your team.
And that extends your active time online playing, since you need to do daily quest bitchwork to get the currency you need to do the Horrific Vision scenarios to upgrade the cloak. This is in addition to sopping up Magic Planet Blood to upgrade your Magic Planet Blood Sponge so that you can slot in Yet Another Essence to further enhance your man's ability to use broken-as-can-be Corrupted gear without taking crippling penalties as well as ensure that your man can actually use the new Azerite Armors that drop.
Do you see the issue here? The dev team--pressured by the bean-counters--are taking away the players' autonomy regarding how to approach the game. The gutting of crafting, the psuedo-esport shift in attitude towards content, and the hard-leaning into the metagame element (such as encouraging next week's livestreaming of the World First Race on multple levels) all point towards running the game with an eye to maximizing those quarterly numbers and not on long-term stewardship of a corporate IP and its brand identity.
If this were a Battle Royale game, which is ground-up designed for such a business model, I'd not complain about it. It's not. The MMORPG, be it a sandbox or a themepark--the latter is World of Warcraft--is meant to be a medium where the player has real autonomy over how he approaches playing the game. The way WOW is run now, a player's approach is routinely dictated to him such that he does not have that autonomy or it is severely restricted and this is one such layered method of doing so.
If I wanted this sort of linear approach, I'd play something else, because it's likely to be better than this simply by being purpose built for it- and here's a Russian Badger video showing off DOOM Eternal to show you what I mean.
