Author: VD

RIP George Michael

It is being reported that George Michael died peacefully at home today. He was 53.


The star, who launched his career with Wham in the 1980s and later continued his success as a solo performer, is said to have “passed away peacefully at home”.


Thames Valley Police said South Central Ambulance Service attended a property in Goring in Oxfordshire at 13:42 GMT.


Police say there were no suspicious circumstances.

An introduction to Selenoth

In case you’re wondering what all the discussion of the various Selenoth-related books is about, or if some of the superlatives being cast about could be even remotely justified, you can now dip your toe into the epic fantasy waters at neither risk nor cost to yourself, as A MAGIC BROKEN is free on Kindle today.

The ebook is a novella in which is related the brief intersection of two perspective characters from A THRONE OF BONES and A SEA OF SKULLS prior to the events of either book. I think those who are fans of the Arts of Dark and Light series would agree that it is a reasonably fair warning of what the reader can expect from immersion into what is now, according to Amazon’s most recent Kindle Normalized Page Count, a cumulative 3,053 pages of epic high fantasy.

Anyhow, if you haven’t read it yet, I’d encourage you to download it and check it out. Even if fantasy isn’t really your thing, it’s more than a bit of a spy thriller as well.

Merry Christmas!

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
– John 1:1-5

This is the true hope and promise of Christmas. The light shines, even in the darkness that engulfs the world today, and the darkness will not overcome it.

Whether you are surrounded with love and family and decorations and presents, or whether you find yourself in a motel surrounded by nothing more festive than a wi-fi connection and few empty cans of beer, you are not alone today. You are part of the great celebration of the miracle, the great golden net of believers that reaches all the way around the world and binds the Church together.

Because at its heart, Christmas is not about togetherness or silver bells or snow. It is about the Word becoming flesh and coming to dwell among us, the spark that lit the fire in the hearts of men that will never be extinguished.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

The Alt-Right is the future

There is no hope in the Left. There is no hope in the conservative Right. There is only one place where there is genuine hope for the future of the West, and that is by placing one’s trust in God first and Nation second:

Sébastien Faustini’s decision to skip the firework display at the beach not only potentially saved his life — it steered his politics toward the far right. The soft-spoken 18-year-old stayed home with his cousin and watched the Bastille Day display on TV, instead of heading to the Nice promenade as they’d planned on July 14.

A truck was driven into the crowd that night, killing 86 people.

Sebastien Faustini at the National Front’s headquarters in Nice, France. Lauren Brigitte Chadwick
“We could have been there,” said Faustini, who is now forced to pass by the scene of attack daily on his way to university. “Every day that hits me.”

Three weeks ago, he joined France’s far-right National Front.

“Certain media organizations stigmatize members of the National Front calling them fascists, insults that have nothing to do with the party’s program,” Faustini told NBC News.

Faustini is far from alone. Many millennials are embracing the National Front — which boasts a founder who had been fined repeatedly for racism and anti-Semitism. They say recent terrorist attacks across Europe and high unemployment levels validate their personal views and the party’s anti-immigration stance.

“THE FAILURE OF THE RIGHT TO DO SOMETHING AND THE FAILURE OF THE LEFT TO CHANGE ANYTHING MAKES MARINE LE PEN THE PERSON WHO REPRESENTS CHANGE”

According to a report released by polling organization Odoxa on Dec. 16, the National Front is the political party with the most support among French people aged 18-34. Roughly one-in-five back it.

Ignore the converged institutions and corrupt organizations. They are all irrelevant. Ignore those who falsely call themselves “Christians” and “Americans” and “Europeans”. They have no truth in them. God created the nations. He’s not going to allow them to be Babelized, no matter how determined the servants of the Prince of This World are to make themselves gods.

All we need is twelve. All we need is the Word.

When you are attacked and scorned and slandered for speaking the truth, by whom are you opposed? When you are hated by the world for speaking the truth, whom do you serve?

A dangerous parting shot

The Washington Post belatedly begins to understand that perhaps those crazy people saying Obama is, at the very least, pro-Muslim, weren’t necessarily so crazy after all:

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S decision to abstain on a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements reverses decades of practice by both Democratic and Republican presidents. The United States vetoed past resolutions on the grounds that they unreasonably singled out Jewish communities in occupied territories as an obstacle to Middle East peace, and that U.N. action was more likely to impede than advance negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

The measure, approved 14 to 0 by the Security Council Friday, is subject to the same criticism: It will encourage Palestinians to pursue more international sanctions against Israel rather than seriously consider the concessions necessary for statehood, and it will give a boost to the international boycott and divestment movement against the Jewish state, which has become a rallying cause for anti-Zionists. At the same time, it will almost certainly not stop Israeli construction in the West Bank, much less in East Jerusalem, where Jewish housing was also deemed by the resolution to be “a flagrant violation under international law.”

By abstaining, the administration did not explicitly support that position, which has not been U.S. policy since the Carter administration. In explaining the vote, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power pointed out that the council was sanctioning Israel even while failing to take action to stop a potential genocide in South Sudan or the slaughter in Aleppo, Syria. Yet in failing to veto the measure, the Obama administration set itself apart both from previous administrations and from the incoming presidency of Donald Trump, who spoke out strongly against the resolution.

Israeli officials charged that the abstention represented a vindictive parting shot by Mr. Obama at Mr. Netanyahu, with whom he has feuded more bitterly than he did with most U.S. adversaries. The vote could also be seen as an attempt to preempt Mr. Trump, who appears ready to shift U.S. policy to the opposite extreme after naming a militant advocate of the settlements as his ambassador to Israel. Whatever the motivation, Mr. Obama’s gesture is likely to do more harm than good.

It boggles the mind how the American Left fails to understand that importing people from countries where the population is anti-Israel was always going to move the US in an anti-Israel direction.

Family SJWs and the holidays

Remember, SJWs have no respect for decorum or regard for their families or the holidays:

In a discussion with my son and his girlfriend, I said that their city’s homogeneity (it is almost all white) was behind the low crime rate when it was mentioned that there was a stabbing behind a bar the other night. This led to an accusatory, ‘What do you mean by homogeneity?’ by the SJW girlfriend and so I spilled the next fact – that blacks are more likely to commit crimes. The SJW girlfriend of my son quickly went nuclear and said I was a racist and that when controlled for socio-economic factor blacks do not commit crimes at higher rates than whites and that discussion of racist ideas was not tolerated in her house. The evening was ruined. The relationship with son and girlfriend is forever changed.

I have read SJWs Always Lie, and would appreciate your advice on how you suggest to use rhetoric instead of dialectic with known SJWs that are also family? Any suggestion on how I recover from this?

You don’t “recover” from unmasking an SJW. Remember, they always lie, they always double down, and they always project.

At this point, the correct thing to do is to refuse to have further contact with her, or to allow her in his home until she apologizes for calling him a racist. Most people won’t do this, of course, especially when faced with the inevitable female pressure for everyone to humor the most volatile member of the family in the interest of a false peace. I would have laughed at her willful ignorance, told my son that he really needed to rethink the wisdom of potentially allowing an idiot like her to contribute to the family gene pool, and left.

Yes, family is important, but girlfriends aren’t family. And life is far too short to waste any of it on putting up with SJWs. Tolerating SJWs is the intellectual equivalent of putting up with someone who insists on using the living room as a toilet. Why would you even consider doing it?

Nearly everyone makes the fatal mistake of trying to be reasonable with them. That is a category error. SJWs respond only to emotional pain, so the only way to get them to stop doubling down on their misbehavior is to make them feel more pain by failing to behave as members of a civilized society. The more one apologizes and negotiates and pleads, the more intransigent they get. The harsher you treat them, the more likely it is that they will sheepishly return to the fold.

However, in light of how family SJWs are going to be even more easily triggered than usual this year due to the imminent Ascension of the God-Emperor to the Cherry Blossom Throne, I would recommend not only avoiding political conversations, but refusing to permit others to start them in the first place. If a family SJW does insist on bringing up politics, especially if they do so in that passive-aggressive way that assumes agreement with the speaker’s statement, the best thing to do is probably to express your delight about the Ascension of the God-Emperor – in those precise terms – and begin a debate concerning whether Donald Trump will be the greatest U.S. president since a) Ronald Reagan, b) Andrew Jackson, or c) George Washington.

The shock of the cognitive dissonance should be sufficient to put your family SJW in a socially catatonic state, which will be appreciated by everyone else.

In general, I find that smiling, refusing to back down in any way, and treating their antics like an indulged child usually works best.

If you’re not convinced

Perhaps you will be after reading the reviews of the recently released A SEA OF SKULLS, Book Two in the Arts of Light and Dark epic fantasy series. If you haven’t started the series yet, you will probably want to start with Book One, A THRONE OF BONES, which is available in Kindle Unlimited.


Worthy successor series to LOTR
“A Sea of Skulls” picks up and accelerates the pace from “A Throne of Bones”. We see some well-developed characters killed off, but encounter other interesting characters of multiple Selenoth races. Amorr and its former allies and provinces gird for war, while a Lost Legion allies with X to defend against a major orc invasion. The elves and dwarves gather their forces to defend against orcs, and also to keep a sharp eye on Man. At several places, you feel a cold chill as you realize one of the minor characters might well be one of the first race, hiding in shadows, biding its time and waiting to seize power for their own ends (enslaving or destroying the younger races). The action and lead characters are spread across the continent, where military action or political intrigue in one realm affects three or four others. The story line is woven more deftly than the first book, and increases the pull of action and intrigue.

Each race has its backstory and cultural values; gruesome as some may be, the cultures, assumptions, and lifestyles are internally consistent. Vox Day also describes each race’s military merit well, showing a consistent triad of strategy, tactics, and logistics that fits with the race’s culture. There are no all-powerful and ever-victorious species in Selenoth; the trick is in understanding your own strengths and then using you enemy’s weakness to best effect. Coalition forces work or don’t work, based on how well the commanders enhance strength and mitigate weaknesses. Political and social life are well written and reasonable for each race. Some of the best moments in the character views are watching how one observer looks in amazement or bemusement at how another race or culture lives – the fish out of water scenario. The set of viewpoint characters is finite and severely bounded, so it’s possible to keep several scattered event tracks in mind with minimal searching for a reminder.

There is a comparison to be made with A Song of Ice and Fire. By comparison, the Arts of Dark and Light is written much richer, more coherently, with a better span of scope, and with a definite conclusion in mind.

A Genre Revisited
From the moment you pick up, and/or scroll through your epub device, you will not be able to put this book down until you have finished it…. If ASOS were an MMA fight, you will be punched in the face in the first thirty seconds, and continually pummeled until the end. There is no respite, no pauses in the action…you will experience Ali fighting Frazier from the moment you begin until the instant you reluctantly put the book down. Each POV character introduced is both interesting and endearing. The characters are so expertly written, that you find yourself wondering who you are rooting for. You will not need to continually consult the appendix to figure out who is speaking…the characters are immediately apparent and recognizable.

I slogged through Jordan’s Wheel of Time series years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed, and struggled through, Martin’s endless introduction of characters in his later books. Regarding both great authors, I must admit that there were times where I scrolled quickly through the flotsam to get to the action. ASOS requires no such recklessness. For those who disregard Vox Day as a Christian seeking to further his evangelistic agenda, have no fear. There is none of that. The prelude itself will avail you of any attempt to evangelize the Christian agenda…. Vox Day has successfully taken a genre and, as no author has done in the past decade, rewritten the rules for fantasy and violence.




Great novel: Better than the first
As others have noted, this sequel is better than the original. The writing is better. The characters get better. The dialog gets better. Everything is better. And the first was great.

There is a love that Vox has for his characters. It shows in the richness of vision that describes them, and the way he holds them true to themselves and the culture that created them. It is easy to suspend disbelief in Selenoth and to get caught up in the narrative, carried along by the vivid “lifefullness” of his creations. Even the antagonists in the story, fighting for the “wrong” side, are delivered with an empathy to allow the reader to ride alongside them: Thinking what and how they think, feeling what and why they feel.

Wrap those characters around a exceptionally good story line and you come out with the absolute best novel of the year. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.




Fantastic Epic Fantasy
I have hours poring through this monster…. and I can say it is superior in every way to its predecessor. Be forewarned… if you haven’t read A Throne of Bones recently it may be worth your while to refresh your memory a bit. This book doesn’t hold your hand. There is no backtracking to catch you up on important details you may not remember. And if you haven’t read A Throne of Bones then you absolutely cannot start with this one.

The writing is more taut. The different races… orcs… elves… dwarves… are treated much better than the standard fantasy offering and genuinely feel like distinct cultures. Some of the best chapters of the book are actually written from an orc invader’s perspective. The book is courageously written. It doesn’t play nice with your modern sensibilities… and it does not shrink from the brutal realities of invasion, warfare, and barbarism