Author: VD

Buzzfeed and the stolen emails

Buzzfeed apparently got their hands on some stolen emails of Milo’s, a few of which were his exchanges with me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the most noteworthy aspect of today’s “expose” on Milo.

A year and a half ago, Milo Yiannopoulos set himself a difficult task: to define the alt-right. It was five months before Hillary Clinton named the alt-right in a campaign speech, 10 months before the alt-right’s great hope became president, and 17 months before Charlottesville clinched the alt-right as a stalking horse for violent white nationalism. The movement had just begun its explosive emergence into the country’s politics and culture.

At the time, Yiannopoulos, who would later describe himself as a “fellow traveler” of the alt-right, was the tech editor of Breitbart. In summer 2015, after spending a year gathering momentum through GamerGate — the opening salvo of the new culture wars — he convinced Breitbart upper management to give him his own section. And for four months, he helped Bannon wage what the Breitbart boss called in emails to staff “#war.” It was a war, fought story by story, against the perceived forces of liberal activism on every conceivable battleground in American life.

Yiannopoulos was a useful soldier whose very public identity as a gay man (one who has now married a black man) helped defend him, his anti-political correctness crusade, and his employer from charges of bigotry.

But now Yiannopoulos had a more complicated fight on his hands. The left — and worse, some on the right — had started to condemn the new conservative energy as reactionary and racist. Yiannopoulos had to take back “alt-right,” to redefine for Breitbart’s audience a poorly understood, leaderless movement, parts of which had already started to resist the term itself….

Over the next three days, Yiannopoulos passed the article back to Yarvin and the white nationalist Saucier, the latter of whom gave line-by-line annotations. He also sent it to Vox Day, a writer who was expelled from the board of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for calling a black writer an “ignorant savage,” and to Alex Marlow, the editor of Breitbart.

“Solid, fair, and fairly comprehensive,” Vox Day responded, with a few suggestions.

“Most of it is great but I don’t want to rush a major long form piece like this,” Marlow wrote back. “A few people will need to weigh in since it deals heavily with race.”

Lawsy me! Tell me if you can see why I find the reference to me to be absolutely hilarious. Also, in case you haven’t been around here since 2013, the quote attributed to me is both incomplete and incorrect. I actually called SFWA’s affirmative action pet NK Jemisin, the columnist for the The New York Times Book Review and one of only three two-straight winners of the Hugo Award for Best Novel in science fiction history, “an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine.”

Just to be clear.

The return of La Serenissima

Now that Catalonia is on the verge of independence, Lombardia and Venezia are next:

Italy facing its OWN Catalonia: Referendums in Lombardy and Venice could TOPPLE EU

This month the Lombardy region and the city of Venice will both vote on new powers of autonomy at referendums which are now taking on increasing levels of controversy. Previously seen as a low-scale vote on local powers, the referendums are now experiencing symbolic overtones following last Sunday’s Catalonian chaos.

Last weekend more than 800 people were injured by police as a referendum on independence for Catalonia was held – against the express wishes of leaders in Madrid and Brussels. And now Italy is facing similar chaos with two referendums set to be held on October 22, although in these instances the votes are state-approved and will not face violent opposition.

I’m pretty sure the Venetian referendum will pass. I’m less confident about the Lombardian vote, since there are some heavily socialist regions of the province, but it stands a reasonable chance of passing, especially given what we’re seeing out of Spain. And unlike Catalonia, neither Venetians nor Lombardians are at all keen on the EU. It’s time to let Garibaldi’s Folly pass into history and bring back the great Italian city-states of the Renaissance.

Basta bugie, no UE! 

Media: Wait, don’t you live in Lombardia?
VD: (whistles innocently)

Catalonia to declare independence

Apparently the combination of Spain’s actions and the EU’s statements have pushed the Catalan separatists over the edge:

Catalonia will move on Monday to declare independence from Spain after holding a banned referendum, pushing the European Union nation toward a rupture that threatens the foundations of its young democracy.

Catalan President Carles Puigdemont said he favored mediation to find a way out of the crisis but that Spain’s central government had rejected this. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government responded by calling on Catalonia to “return to the path of law” first before any negotiations.

Mireia Boya, a Catalan lawmaker from the pro-independence Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP) party, said a declaration of independence would follow a parliamentary session on Monday to evaluate the results of the Oct. 1 vote to break away.

“We know that there may be disbarments, arrests … But we are prepared, and in no case will it be stopped,” she said on Twitter.

To paraphrase Ben Franklin, you can declare your independence, but can you keep it? It will be informative to see what lengths Spain is willing to go to keep Catalonia, and what the EU is willing to permit Spain to do.

But, as we know from our study of socionomics, the breakup of both Spain and the EU are inevitable. The pendulum is just beginning to swing back from its credit boom heights.

EU or independence

The EU helpfully clarifies the situation for Catalonia:

European Union officials have ruled out helping to mediate the clash between Spain’s government and Catalan officials over Catalonia’s upcoming independence referendum.

European Parliament President Antonio Tajani said at an EU summit in Estonia on Friday that the dispute is “a Spanish problem in which we can do little. It’s a problem of respecting Spanish laws that Spaniards have to resolve.”

Catalan officials, including the mayor of Barcelona, have asked the EU to mediate the tense standoff ahead of Sunday’s planned vote that Spanish authorities say is illegal.

Tajani says the EU is maintaining its support of Spain’s government because “on a legal level, Madrid is right.” He says: “I think it’s important to talk on a political level after Monday.”

The EU has said Catalonia will be ejected from the bloc, if it declares independence.

And now we’ll be able to discover if the Catalonians really want to be independent, or if they just wanted a direct line to EU largesse.

“The art sucks”

Along with “no one will support this” and “HAHAHAHAHA LMFAO”, “the art sucks” has been one of the constant refrains of comic SJWs since they first became aware of Alt★Hero a few days before the Freestartr launch. We had, of course, announced the project months before, but they simply hadn’t paid it any heed until the first image of Rebel triggered them into a swarm.

Now, what those of you who have not paid attention to the SJW convergence in comics may not realize is that the art bar is considerably lower than you probably imagine it to be. For example, on the left is Kamala Khan, Ms Marvel, a teenage Muslim who is tragically afflicted with elephantiasis, but nevertheless, persists despite her handicap. On the right is Janelle Jeanneret, also known as Dynamique of the Global Justice Initiative, who I will remind is not supposed to be smoking while wearing her superhero outfit.

However, I do not subscribe to the genetic fallacy. The fact that malicious people of evil intent are seeking to discredit and disqualify the project does not necessarily mean that all of their criticism is invalid. Although I vastly prefer the Alt★Hero artwork by Cliff Cosmic, and would be quite happy to proceed with the project on that basis, Castalia House has always taken an iterative approach to quality. This is occasionally a little disturbing to some of our readers, who would prefer that we try to get everything flawless at the start, but the reality is that we’re still learning what we’re doing. And since the art is not the very best in the industry, that means it can be improved.

On a related note, if you think Alt★Hero looks amateurish, have a look at the formatting of some of our early ebooks, or our first casebound hardcover. The latter was particularly bad; we used a paperback template and the back cover text wound up actually touching one side of the back cover. The choice of font was a mistake too, and the interior paragraph spacing was excessive. But we have worked steadily at improving the quality of our products, and now our print editions are generally superior to those offered by our mainstream competitors.

We are taking the same iterative approach to Alt★Hero, which is why I’m very pleased to announce that Marvel and DC Comics veteran colorist Matteo Mystic has joined the team. He sent over the following bio:

In the process of working with the best artists in the comic book business for well over a decade, Matteo Mystic learned the dark arts of the great colorists and earned the privilege of working on top Marvel and DC titles such as Spider-Man, X-Men, and Superman. But after experiencing a crisis of faith, he fled the industry to a monastery high in the Italian Alps. He now spends his days illuminating Bibles and his evenings utilizing his skills in alternative heroics.

Mr. Mystic will be coloring four of the first six volumes. You can see his first work on Alt★Hero at the Freestartr campaign, at the end of Dynamique’s six-page introduction. I await with eagerness to hear the inevitable praise of those whose helpful advice we have taken to heart.

When losing, lose harder

Having failed to learn from the failure of its initial show of force, Spain appears to be intent on losing the moral level of war and is doubling down.

Defense Tuesday ordered the sending of the Army to Catalonia with material and to provide logistical support to the Civil Guard and the National Police . 

This should end well and totally convince the Catalonians that they really, truly are better off as part of Spain. I doubt it escapes anyone’s attention that the Spanish government has shown itself completely unwilling to use its Army against the marauding immigrants invading the country.

Cracking under pressure

Brian Niemeier is more than a little amused by John Scalzi cracking under the combined pressure of his big, beautiful book contract and the God-Emperor’s presidency:

Scalzi’s “the dog ate my homework” post is yet another indication that #1-selling indie author Nick Cole is about to be vindicated once more. To quote Nick:

Okay.  As I’ve talked about before this before… this is what happens next:

  • Big Pub reduces its Author List down to servicing Cadillac Clients.  Many authors who think they’re something are about to be shown the door in the form of un-returned emails, unanswered calls, and not talk of future projects.  Already happening.
  • Amazon Opens Book Stores.
  • Trad Pub Authors attempt to seamlessly bring themselves, and their mojo, into Amazon and fail badly because they’re not used to the volume of work.  Marketing, Formatting, Editing, Social Media, and most importantly now: a tight release schedule of every 30-90 days.  Also Amazon picks the winners and its more interested in New Talent.

A cataclysmic paradigm shift is underway that will soon overturn the publishing landscape as we know it. Indie has been overtaking tradpub for years, and now the Big Five New York publishers’ sole advantage–their paper distribution monopoly–is about to collapse.

When B&N goes, it will take the tradpub midlist with it. You’ll know the old era is over when current tradpub authors start trying to go indie. But as Nick forecasts and Scalzi confirms, former tradpub darlings are woefully unprepared to handle the increased workload.

And that’s just on the writing front. Factor in the additional responsibilities of being your own publisher and marketing department, and consider how a guy who can’t finish a novel in ten months with the backing of sci-fi’s biggest publisher will fare in the new order.

Here’s the truth: Scalzi’s ongoing nosedive has nothing to do with who’s president or the current weather. It has everything to do with the fact that Patrick Nielsen Hayden handed him a golden ticket. Scalzi has never had to work in this business without Tor propping up his career. Now he’s losing favor to N.K. Jemisin, his last book underperformed, and he’s falling behind on his contract–all in the looming shadow of B&N’s failure.

I prefer to characterize my friend Nick Cole as a bestselling Castalia House author, but otherwise, Brian has described the situation rather well.

I’m sure you will understand that I found this comment to be particularly entertaining.

“The worst part of all this is that Vox called it when he was given the deal in the first place. And Scalzi, in his arrogance, set about to prove him right.”

The thing is, I wasn’t making the prediction out of any malice or SJW-style magical thinking. It was entirely obvious to me that an author whose primary skill was marketing himself to editors was not going to be successful once they stopped devoting excessive resources to propping him up and maintaining a false narrative about his skill and his success. Scalzi is, and has always been, a mediocre mid-list author with a penchant for juvenile vulgarity. If he submitted a manuscript to us under a different name, there is virtually no chance we would accept it for publication.

That being said, John Scalzi is very highly skilled and he is extraordinarily successful, just not at what he wants you to believe he is. The challenge facing him is that while those particular skills were integral to his success in a traditional publishing model that required currying favor with SJW editors and the pseudo-media of SF fandom, they are considerably less useful in the brave new world of publishing today.

Losing is good for you

Ed Latimore explains why losing can be beneficial, even losing in a public and humiliating manner:

Despite my obnoxious posting about my fight on Showtime this last weekend, I hope you had something better to do than watch. If you didn’t, then I’ll fill you in. I got stopped in the 1st round.

It’s heavyweight boxing. When you have two men over 200 lbs throwing hard shots, someone is bound to go down. My opponent (quite the affable fellow outside the ring), landed a great short right over my jab and the fight was short lived after that.

It’s a terrible way to lose. Worse, it was live for the whole world to see. It’s awful but it’s part of life. I move on and become better from it.

In many ways, I learned more from this 3 minutes (technically speaking, the referee called a stop to the contest sometime after the 2-minute mark) than I did from the rest of my 9-year career in boxing. Life is funny this way.

If you can look at things the right way, you learn more from failure than success. Jay-Z once said, “I will not lose for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so that evens it up for me”.

Here are 8 valuable lessons I learned from losing on national television.

Embarrassment is the worst emotion to feel 

It’s miserable because there’s no real way to confront or conquer it. You can face your fears. You can cheer yourself up if your sad. Embarrassment is just a burden you bear until it heals. The one fortunate thing about embarrassment is that like all other negative emotions, it is extremely susceptible to the power of gratitude.

These are the lessons that gammas never learn, because their fear of failure and the humiliation they wrongly believe it necessarily entails precludes them from putting themselves at risk of failure. They don’t understand that the lessons one learns from losing not only makes success more likely in the future, but that there is no shame whatsoever in a defeat in which one genuinely did one’s best and was simply overcome by a superior opponent.

The most ferociously competitive team with which I was ever associated was the kid’s soccer team I coached about ten years ago. Their first year, they lost every game, and usually badly. As a result, they developed a total immunity to any fear of losing, and, much to the confusion of the other teams, would celebrate every rare goal as if they had won the game. Two years later, they upset the provincial champions who were affiliated with the main professional club in the region by beating them in the championship games of both of the major tournaments. The next year, they went undefeated, won both tournaments again, and this time, only allowed a handful of goals the entire season.

They weren’t particularly big or particularly skilled, but the combination of their intensity and their total lack of fear was intimidating, even to the parents watching them. “They are wolves with a taste for blood,” one opposing coach memorably said, shaking his head, after a game in which I put our leading scorer into goal to prevent him from running up the score, started talking to one player’s father, then looked up to see the kid bringing the ball up past midfield to send a perfect cross to a teammate for another goal. The kid was so goal-hungry that I practically had to tie the kid to the bench to keep him from putting the ball in the net.

And it was their season of “humiliating failure”, all those 13-1 and 10-0 losses, that forged them into an extraordinarily successful team.

Read the rest there.

UPDATE: Paperback #2 and Hardcover #2 now available

And Dynamique is considering her options. We’ve got some very interesting new Alt★Hero developments we’ll be announcing soon, including at least one new stretch goal, although I understand it is going to be a few days before we’ll able to add the various add-ons that people have been requesting. Don’t worry, we’ve got more than three weeks left, so there is plenty of time to straighten these things out.

I’m also interested in learning what size figurine between 8 and 10 inches would be of most interest to the Rebel backers. Remember, you can back the project for only $15 and you’ll receive the first SIX volumes of Alt★Hero in their digital format.

UPDATE: In its fifth day, Alt★Hero is already in the top 5 percent of all Kickstarter projects ever. Back the project and help us move into the top one percent!

UPDATE: We’ve made some changes to the Rewards and stretch goals. We’ve decided not to wait to greenlight Paperback and Hardcover #2, both of which will include Volumes IV, V, and VI, so the two stretch goals are can now be considered preemptively reached. Both editions can be ordered now via the appropriate Reward level; Add-On: Paperback #2 is $30 and Add-On: Hardcover #2 is $65. Neither comes with anything else, but shipping is included.

We’ve also replaced the $70k stretch goal as follows:

Alt★Hero Novel
Castalia House will publish the first Alt★Hero novel, co-written by Vox Day and an author to be named when this goal is met. The book will be published in ebook, audiobook, and trade paperback editions.

The death of the cloud

This sort of thing is why we don’t use the cloud. Frankly, I don’t understand why anyone does.

Yahoo said a major security breach in 2013 compromised all three billion accounts the company maintained, a three-fold increase over the estimate it disclosed previously.

The revelation, contained in an updated page about the 2013 hack, is the result of new information and the forensic analysis of an unnamed security consultant. Previously, Yahoo officials said about one billion accounts were compromised. With Yahoo maintaining roughly three billion accounts at the time, the 2013 hack would be among the biggest ever reported.

“We recently obtained additional information and, after analyzing it with the assistance of outside forensic experts, we have identified additional user accounts that were affected,” Yahoo officials wrote in the update. “Based on an analysis of the information with the assistance of outside forensic experts, Yahoo has determined that all accounts that existed at the time of the August 2013 theft were likely affected.”

The information taken in the heist may have included users’ names, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, passwords scrambled using the weak MD5 cryptographic hashing algorithm, and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. Yahoo said investigators don’t believe the stolen information included passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information. Yahoo also provided updated figures in a press release and in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As if there is any chance – any chance at all – that they didn’t know that all of the information had been taken. Who trusts anything these Big Tech companies say anymore anyhow?

Sure, I use Blogger and Gmail, but always in the full knowledge that everything on this blog and in my email could go public one day. There is no such thing as “security” in social media.