Author: VD

Sandman 2 Sucks

Even The Guardian, hitherto one of Neil Gaiman’s most reliable cheerleaders and microphones, has finally discovered that Gaiman isn’t a very good storyteller, let alone showrunner:

The Sandman season two review – Neil Gaiman’s emo drama is so pretentious it ruins everything

The Sandman really is a curious beast. Where other, similar series centre around a hero warrior, the main guy here is more of an emo worrier, for ever standing stiffly in the shadowy corner of the frame, evading other characters’ gazes as he sulkily delivers platitudes suffused with doom and – quite literally, given the production’s apparent lighting shortage, gloom. The rhombus-jawed Sturridge is physically ideal for the role of Morpheus, with his concave cheeks and a set of eyelashes that could have someone’s eye out. But while his impeccably backcombed barnet and swishy monochrome outfits suggest he is about to break into a chorus of Echo and the Bunnymen’s The Killing Moon at any moment – someone in the design department enjoys their 1980s pop, because they have also styled Freddie Fox’s Loki to look eerily like Billy Idol – he is, by design, never that entertaining. Even when he is turning Thor’s throbbing hammer to dust or personally granting William Shakespeare creative immortality, what could be fantastic adventures are always shuffled through stroppily as if they are tedious obligations.

It just about works as an elaborate analogy for teenage disaffection – a time when you feel as if you’re acquiring some sort of awful power, but everyone becomes angry when you try to wield it, and not knowing why makes you more peevish still. When the show co-opts Greek, Norse and Christian mythologies, though, it doesn’t do much with them.

Gaiman still hasn’t been locked up or cancelled yet, and it’s still possible that between his ethnic and Scientologist connections, he will continue to escape accountability until he dies unrepentant and takes his seat that would appear to be reserved for Hell.

But the bloom is well off the rose. Even the people and organizations that have been blowing hallucinogenic smoke up everyone’s backsides for the last 30 years have finally cottoned on to the charade and are no longer interested in helping him maintain his facade.

And that unmasking may well be the cruelest fate of all to a raging narcissist who has always known that he was an imposter.

DISCUSS ON SG

Shots Fired! Shots Fired!

Much like the way the air grows still and the sky takes on a greenish tinge, one can almost feel the inevitable Facebook rant coming.

With Larry Correia announcing he would be launching a Kickstarter for his new Ark Press venture, a Baen Books insider reached out to Fandom Pulse to vent how similar the series seemed to their hit with him, Monster Hunter International. With Correia taking his own successful work and doing a spin on it for Ark Press, one has to wonder with AI writing becoming as good as it is, who can do MHI better: AI, or Larry Correia himself?

Artificial Intelligence has become increasingly good at writing with giant leaps up in the technological prowess over the last year, especially with the help of Claude Sonnet and Claude Opus 4.0 delivering prose levels many never thought possible.

Vox Day has been experimenting with AI to no small degree, making full albums out of music on Suno and testing the capabilities on short stories ranging from styles of Neil Gaiman, to John Scalzi, and even Larry Correia, pioneering the future in AI art.

Meanwhile, in traditional publishing, it appears as if Baen Books is in massive trouble as Correia sees the proverbial writing on the wall and has taken moves to diversify out of his long-time publisher and now announced he’s going to be kickstarting a series, American Paladin, that sounds very similar to Monster Hunter International, his long-time gun urban fantasy series that’s been a hit with Baen over the years.

Ark Press, his new publisher which is owned by mega-billionaire Peter Thiel, seemed to want an MHI-style story out of Correia to launch the press, and they’ve advertised its similarities as well.

Since Correia is taking his hit series and giving a new take on it, the question is, can AI build a better modern iteration of MHI than Larry Correia himself can given its new found prowess?

Vox Day has already been working on this with a serialized novel called Monster Control Inc. In this, he’s trained AI to write in Larry Correia’s style to provide a signature version that reads enough like Correia that if you didn’t know it was written by AI, you might think it’s Correia’s novels.

Just to be clear, Monster Control Incorporated utilizes a judicious blend of literary seasonings, one of which is Larry Correia’s. But because the objective was to utilize a Gamma protagonist, and since Larry is the most Delta author who ever wrote a Delta self-insert since Louis Lamour laid down his prolific pen, it was necessary to bring in other elements in order to capture that inimitable Gamma snark, passive-aggressiveness, and relentless obsession with unattainable women.

I also didn’t think that Larry’s signature gun porn was desirable in this case, although I certainly did utilize that in my non-AI Quantum Mortis novel, A Man Disrupted, and to such an extent that more than one review even asserted that I had outcorreia’d Correia himself, although I think that was not actually true and was merely an overenthusiastic response to my incorporation of orbital artillery into a police procedural.

It will be an interesting test, though. Can one of the leading critics of textual AI write a better pastiche of his own style than an AI can? Read Monster Control Incorporated and find out!

I’ve been walking my crush home since last week to protect her from all the creeps walking around. Next week I’m going to introduce myself to her.

DISCUSS ON SG

It Isn’t Theirs

Never take the “success” of the rich and famous at face value. Because their success isn’t real, their riches don’t belong to them, and their lives are false fronts put on for the public.

Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has said that his children will inherit “less than 1%” of his wealth when he eventually passes away. But even while their parents are alive, the Gates children won’t be coasting off the family fortune—and Melinda French Gates is making sure of it, starting with saying no to funding her daughter’s new startup.

Melinda French Gates may be one of the wealthiest women in the world, with an estimated $30.8 billion net worth, but you won’t catch her writing checks for her daughter’s new startup.

“I have a daughter who just started a business this year,” the billionaire philanthropist and ex-wife of Bill Gates recently explained at the Power of Women’s Sports Summit presented by E.l.f. Beauty. “She got capitalized not because of my contacts, not because of me. I wouldn’t put money into it.”

An individual can only sell her own soul. Her daughter will just have to make her own bargain with the devils of the world.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Bear Necessities

A UATV supporter explains the necessity of Big Bear on Instagram.

Et tu, Spacebunny? She added a comment there.

We have had this convo – your ability to make Vox comprehensible is legendary.

To be fair, it is a genuine problem. My idea of what is a sufficient explanation and pretty much everyone else’s don’t tend to have much in common. I see this coming and going, both in what apparently are popularly regarded as my insufficient explanations and everyone else’s determination to give me ten times more information than I need or want. What is so impressive about Big Bear in this regard is his ability to instantly grasp the various levels of detail required to explain a given concept to different people.

I still remember one time on a stream when he asked me to explain something, so I provided what I felt was the requisite explanation in what I thought was all the necessary detail. Big Bear just stared at me for a second, then said: “Yeah, you’re going to need to go two levels deeper for that to make any sense.”

Which was very helpful, because it’s not a problem to do that. The real challenge that most people don’t seem to grasp is that when you do understand something, you seldom know the precise point of another person’s failure to understand, except that it is somewhere between the complete absence of information and the comprehension of the whole. Compounding this problem is that it is quite normal for people to get offended if you begin at the beginning.

“What do you think I am, an idiot?”

Well, yes, at least in relative terms, given that you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t understand something despite being provided everything that is required for you to do so. But it only took a few beatings from fellow elementary school scholars and a lecture or three from teachers and parents to realize that it is never socially acceptable to say what you are actually thinking about anyone.

That’s why I always think it is outright comical whenever people say, in real life or on TV, that honesty is paramount in relationships. It quite obviously isn’t, in fact, I would go so far as to say that at least for the intelligent individual, relentless dishonesty is the basis for all human relationships, from the most casual to the most intimate. Because if there is one skill that is necessary for surviving the endless sea of retardery in which Man must daily swim, it is relentlessly concealing the truth of one’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions from absolutely everyone.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, obviously understood that.

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance…

Do you know what that is? That’s the rock-solid stoicism born of the despair that comes from 19 years of putting up with a son like Commodus and knowing he had no choice but to leave the whole empire in the care of the solipsistic lunatic.

DISCUSS ON SG

Cruel Dominions

I found this old mix of THE WORD DESCENDED that I’d forgotten I did back in December, and was frankly kind of blown away by it. I think it’s going to have to go on the Soulsigma CD. Anyhow, it’s up on UATV for the subscribers. If you’re feeling down at all over the Espstein coverup, I think this will prove a salutary reminder that it doesn’t matter what they do, because they will never win.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Basic Syllogism

  • MAJOR PREMISE: President Trump promised to clean house on the Deep State and release the Epstein files.
  • MINOR PREMISE: The FBI announced there are no Epstein files.
  • CONCLUSION: ???

This really isn’t that hard. It only requires that you recognize what you believe to be impossible is merely beyond your ability to imagine. But most people trust the Narrative more than they trust logic.

DISCUSS ON SG

Satan’s Little Slave

What a wretched little creature. I remember when he used to agonize over being forced to say what he was told to say. Apparently he’s grown more comfortable with that over time. He simply doesn’t have a single original thought in his head. I used to feel some pity for him, but you know, he made his choice to serve Mammon.

And when you bow down before the one you serve, you get what you deserve.

DISCUSS ON SG

China Warns EU

For the first time, China has openly sided with Russia and acknowledged that it is in a de facto state of conflict with the USA:

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat on Wednesday that Beijing cannot afford a Russian loss in Ukraine because it fears the United States would then shift its whole focus to Beijing, according to several people familiar with the exchange.

The comment, to the EU’s Kaja Kallas, would confirm what many in Brussels believe to be Beijing’s position but jar with China’s public utterances. The foreign minstry regularly says China is “not a party” to the war. Some EU officials involved were surprised by the frankness of Wang’s remarks.

Wang is said to have rejected, however, the accusation that China was materially supporting Russia’s war effort, financially or militarily, insisting that if it was doing so, the conflict would have ended long ago. During a marathon four-hour debate on a wide range of geopolitical and commercial grievances, Wang was said to have given Kallas – the former Estonian prime minister who only late last year took up her role as the bloc’s de facto foreign affairs chief – several “history lessons and lectures”…

The tone of Wednesday’s dialogue was said to be respectful, if tense. Nonetheless, some insiders were surprised by the harshness of Wang’s message, just three weeks out from an important leaders’ summit in China. Any appearance of a charm offensive is seen to have evaporated.

This is not exactly a surprise. China has been waging asymmetric “unrestricted” warfare against the United States since 1999, although part of that strategy has been assiduously avoiding any direct conflict and any actual military engagement. But it appears that as the NATO-Russian war enters what one hopes will be its final stage before the collapse of the Kiev regime and the subsequent Russian stabilization of the situation, China is preparing itself for the US to turn its attention from Ukraine and the Middle East and toward Asia.

Does this have anything to do with what are still nothing more than rumors of Xi’s weakening hold on power? I doubt it, but it’s important to remember that his successor may not be another Western-influenced liberal, but could be considerably more of a hawk on Taiwan, Japan, and the USA than Xi has been.

DISCUSS ON SG

Why You Can’t Trust the Science

The problem isn’t just with the corrupt scientistry, but the mechanism that corrupted them. Namely, the science publishing industry:

It might seem like publishing is a detail. Something that happens at the end of the process, after the real work of science is done. But in truth, publishing defines science.

The currency of value in science has become journal articles. It’s how scientists share and evaluate their work. Funding and career advancement depend on it. This has added to science growing less rigorous, innovative, and impactful over time. This is not a side effect, a conspiracy, or a sudden crisis. It’s an insidious structural feature.

For non-scientists, here’s how journal-based publishing works:

After years of research, scientists submit a narrative of their results to a journal, chosen based on field relevance and prestige. Journals are ranked by “impact factor,” and publishing in high-impact journals can significantly boost careers, visibility, and funding prospects.

Journal submission timing is often dictated by when results yield a “publishable unit” — a well-known term for what meets a journal’s threshold for significance and coherence. Linear, progressive narratives are favored, even if that means reordering the actual chronology or omitting results that don’t fit. This isn’t fraud; it’s selective storytelling aimed at readability and clarity.

Once submitted, an editor either rejects the paper or sends it to a few anonymous peer reviewers — two or three scientists tasked with judging novelty, technical soundness, and importance. Not all reviews are high quality, and not all concerns are addressed before editorial acceptance. Reviews are usually kept private. Scientific disagreements — essential to progress — rarely play out in public view.

If rejected, the paper is re-submitted elsewhere. This loop generally takes 6–12 months or more. Journal submissions and associated data can circulate in private for over a year without contributing to public discussion. When articles are finally accepted for release, journals require an article processing fee that’s often even more expensive if the article is open access. These fees are typically paid for by taxpayer-funded grants or universities.

Several structural features make the system hard to reform:

  • Illusion of truth and finality: Publication is treated as a stamp of approval. Mistakes are rarely corrected. Retractions are stigmatized.
  • Artificial scarcity: Journals want to be first to publish, fueling secrecy and fear of being “scooped.” Also, author credit is distributed through rigid ordering, incentivizing competition over collaboration. In sum, prestige is then prioritized.
  • Insufficient review that doesn’t scale: Three editorially-selected reviewers (who may have conflicts-of-interest) constrain what can be evaluated, which is a growing problem as science becomes increasingly interdisciplinary and cutting edge. The review process is also too slow and manual to keep up with today’s volume of outputs.
  • Narrow formats: Journals often seek splashy, linear stories with novel mechanistic insights. A lot of useful stuff doesn’t make it into public view, e.g. null findings, methods, raw data, untested ideas, true underlying rationale.
  • Incomplete information: Key components of publications, such as data or code, often aren’t shared to allow full review, reuse, and replication. Journals don’t enforce this, even for publications from companies. Their role has become more akin to marketing.
  • Limited feedback loops: Articles and reviews don’t adapt as new data emerges. Reuse and real-world validation aren’t part of the evaluation loop. A single, shaky published result can derail an entire field for decades, as was the case for the Alzheimer’s scandal.

Stack all this together, and the outcome is predictable: a system that delays and warps the scientific process. It was built about a century ago for a different era. As is often the case with legacy systems, each improvement only further entrenches a principally flawed framework.

The system will not, and cannot, be restored in a post-Christian society. Science is not only not incompatible with religion, it is incompatible with irreligion, because no amount of information or technology is an adequate substitute for a collection of zero-trust, amoral, and faithless scientists. When the incentives are askew and the moral brakes are removed, it should not come as a surprise that professional peer-reviewed and published science is already less reliable than a simple coin toss.

Science is just another casualty of the subversion and inversion of Christendom. Which is why the elites have already rejected science and reason in favor of the idol-worshipping, demon-pandering paganism of the pre-Christian world.

DISCUSS ON SG

Baen Books is Dead

Larry Correia has finally embraced crowdfunding and independent publishing:

Larry Correia has made waves this year, breaking from Baen Books for his next releases with Ark Press and Aethon Books, diversifying away from a company that seems to be in trouble, and now he’s revealed he’s going to Kickstarter for his new book as well as revealing the name and cover.

While Larry Correia may have been one of the last traditional publishing authors in speculative fiction to make money, he’s now embraced the future of indie publishing in many ways. He’s moved his next releases to two different upstart presses who are making waves in modern fiction, and is now announcing he’s going to be Kickstarting his new book, as so many others have been doing to great success in recent years.

This comes soon after he announced he wouldn’t be working on new Monster Hunter International material anytime soon, the series that has kept both him and Baen Books afloat over the last several years. With Ark Press having poached several editors and Baen Books’ top talent in Larry Correia, it’s created a number of industry rumblings about the future of the company.

Now, Correia has fueled the flame, showing that independent releases and crowdfunding are the future of publishing, adopting the model that many have succeeded in.

It’s obviously not Larry’s intention to harm Baen. And he owes them absolutely nothing. I think he’s going to absolutely crush it, and well he should! But the indisputable fact is that aside from signing Larry, Baen did a terrible job of replacing the previous generation of authors; the authors that it should have pursued, it spurned for political and ideological reasons, while it signed a panoply of mediocrities who could never have even begun to replace the likes of Jerry Pournelle, John Ringo, and other Baen greats.

The usual suspects can posture and bluster all they like, but I would not expect Baen Books to survive as an operative concern for another 18 months.

DISCUSS ON SG