Author: VD

Wednesday AM Arktoons

ALT★HERO Episode 5: I Will Break You, Scabby Donkey!

DEUS VULT Episode 5: Gorok Strikes

After consulting Arktoons subscribers on SocialGalactic and looking at the current level of subscription resources combined with crowdfunded content, here is the current plan:

  • Most of the most popular comics will stay the same, with long weekly episodes between 20 and 40 panels. This includes A Throne of Bones, Midnight’s War, Alt★Hero, Chuck Dixon’s Avalon, Quantum Mortis, Swan Knight’s Saga, and Ember War, among others.
  • Shade and AH:Q will drop to 8 panels for production reasons. In the case of the latter, we’re going to have to wait several months for Helix Haze to finish some work for one of the dinosaurs before he can illustrate Issues 5 and 6. We looked into replacing him with a different illustrator, but ultimately decided against doing so because we really like his work. The Awakener and Hammer of Freedom will be reduced to 8 panels as well.
  • The new series of Silenziosa will launch with 12 panels, as will one of the two new Brazilian series. The other will launch with 8 panels. The new independent series of Dead Bang will be presented as the publisher sees fit, but we’ll recommend 8-12 panels to them.
  • Six new series, including Something Big will launch with 4-6 panels that will vary from week to week. Subscribers will be given the opportunity to vote on at least two of the series, including who the next AH spinoff character should be. New short episodes of Chicago Typewriter will also be created.
  • As the subscriptions grow over time, we’ll intend to give subscribers the choice between a) making certain series longer and b) more new series. We are still planning the crowdfunding campaign for Midnight’s War, but not until we introduce at least one episode with the new approach to coloring it.
  • 1,000-word text episodes when the feature is ready. The first text series will be the unreleased two chapters of A Sea of Skulls that I promised a few weeks ago.
I understand that the vote for long episodes was unanimous. However, I also recognize that it is probably not an accident that a majority of the most-viewed and most-liked series on Webtoons and Tapas are of the “bite-sized” variety. So, we’re going to try providing excellent examples of both and see what happens; if I have learned one thing over the years, it is to let the market speak for itself and to abandon any plans that are contradicted by it no matter how flawlessly logical they are.
Also, the Arkhaven blog has been crushing it of late, with some very good analysis of the various developments on the cultural war front that is the film and comics industry. The Dark Herald’s article on the inevitable failure of The Fantastic Four is educational on multiple levels.

Sliding toward irrelevance

I’d take this with a grain of salt or two, but the poor metrics are legitimate and President Trump has no one to blame but himself for them.

Online talk about him has plunged to a five-year low. He’s banned or ignored on pretty much every major social media venue. In the last week, Trump’s website — including his new blog, fundraising page and online storefront ­— attracted fewer estimated visitors than the pet-adoption service Petfinder and the recipe site Delish.

Trump is still by far the Republican Party’s biggest star, and conservative lawmakers and provocateurs are now loudly sparring over the importance of loyalty to him ahead of the 2022 midterm elections or a potential second Trump presidential run. Many of the party’s potential 2024 candidates say they will not run if he does, and many of the party’s luminaries have traveled to Florida to meet with him.

But Trump’s continued influence isn’t translating into a bigger online audience, according to a Washington Post review of data from four online-analytics firms. Social engagement around Trump — a measure of likes, reactions, comments or shares on content about him across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Pinterest — has nosedived 95 percent since January, to its lowest level since 2016.

I still don’t understand why President Trump didn’t, at the very least, join Gab and aggressively support alternative social media. But then, I don’t understand why every single conservative in the media would rather whine and cry incessantly about Wikipedia instead of utilizing Infogalactic.

I suspect the two are related, and have something to do with the endless search for approval on the part of those who are drawn to politics and media. But what it is exactly, I am very unqualified to say. 

Tuesday PM Arktoons

EMBER WAR Episode 4: Twenty-Eight Percent

CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON Episode 4: When You Get to Hell

Now that Arktooons has been in operation for nearly one month, we’ve learned a lot, and we’re ready to start applying some of those lessons. One is that more is not always more when it comes to episode lengths. It turns out that some of our more popular series, such as Hypergamouse and Ben Garrison, run short, and a surprisingly high percentage of the most popular series on Webtoons and Tapas run between 2 and 8 panels. 

Apparently, as with Twitter, there is a case to be made that less can sometimes be more. As far as I can tell, it appears to be that if readers really love a series, the longer the better, but if they merely like it, they actually prefer a shorter episode that allows them to take in the whole story without losing interest in it.

So, what we’ve decided to do is introduce some of the new content that we’re going to be launching in June in shorter episodes. The upside is that since the shorter episodes cost less per episode, we’re going to be introducing more new original series than we had planned, including a possible spinoff or two. This approach will not only permit us to produce brand new content from high-calibre illustrators who don’t have the time to commit to full books, but will also allow us to maximize the resources the subscribers are providing.

My question for Arktoons subscribers is this: there are a number of series that will remain in the long episode format, such as Alt-Hero, A Throne of Bones, Midnight’s War, Swan Knight’s Saga, and Quantum Mortis, among others. Would you prefer them to continue appearing as one long episode each week, or would you prefer to see them divided into three shorter episodes each week?

A death squad hunts down The Awakener

The Hulk learns who rules the Hellmouth

Truth 3: Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against millions of Palestinians. Discrimination against Palestinians and confiscation of their land, including in East Jerusalem, is one of the triggers of this latest round of violence. One should not ignore this context.

– Mark Ruffalo Retweeted, 19 May

“Equality, human rights, and prosperity for all from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” The fight for equality happening here in the USA should be the  guiding principle of our values in the Middle East and for our allies abroad.

– Mark Ruffalo, 20 May

Please watch @MehdiHasanShow special on the Middle East is the clarity we need in the fog or war. Why is this happening? How did we get here? What’s actually happened? Has it been fair? What about the children?  What can the USA do stop this ongoing conflict?

– Mark Ruffalo, 20 May

I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing “genocide”. It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad. 

-Mark Ruffalo, 25 May

Now, it is perfectly clear that Israel is not committing genocide, for the obvious reason that it isn’t. The 400-percent growth of the Palestinian population since 1950 is more than sufficient to disprove the accusation. That being said, I strongly suspect that if Americans were to require the Jews resident in the United States to live in a pair of large ghettos under conditions similar to those that the Israelis force the Palestinians to live in Gaza and the West Bank, such an action would be described as genocide too.

So remember, as always, there is no information content in rhetoric. Rhetoric concerns emotional manipulation, not factual accuracy or logical consistency, which is why the slaves of Hell always attempt to reserve the more effective rhetorical weapons for themselves while simultaneously denying the use of the same terms to others even when they are perfectly apposite.

The irony is that Israel is literally a national socialist state, as Zionism is a historical revision of the global socialism of the neoclowns now resident in the United States. It’s not very different than the post-Lenin conflict between Stalin’s national communism and Trotsky’s world revolution. But only those whose minds are firmly established in the dialectic are capable of reading that simple factual statement without spiralling immediately into cognitive dissonance, because the rhetorical antithesis between “Nazi” and “Jew” has been so firmly established that most people can’t even get their heads around the historical fact that the world’s first national socialist party was established in China prior to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and had nothing whatsoever to do with the scattered remnants of a minor Middle Eastern tribe.

In fact, as it happens, explicitly national socialist parties were established in both China and Britain prior to the 1919 founding of the German National Socialist Workers Party.

But those who are engaged in rhetorical wars are always aggressively uninterested in the actual facts of history.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Ruffalo’s genuflection only rates a 4/10 on the cringe scale in comparison with John Cena’s 7/10 public self-flagellation:

“I have to say something very, very, very important now. I love and respect China and Chinese people. I’m very, very sorry about my mistake. I apologise, I apologise, I’m very sorry. You must understand that I really love, really respect China and the Chinese people. My apologies. See you.”

Freedom is slavery

Bruce explains that George Orwell’s famous contradiction isn’t necessarily a contradiction, if the rhetoric is followed into consequences:

The major output of the modern international Mass Media consists of only four categories: 

1. Good presented as bad 

2. Bad presented as Good (That is to say simple inversion) 

3. Good presented as Good for a bad reason 

4. Bad presented as bad for a bad reason (That is to say explanatory inversion) 

These four categories, which can be summarized as either simple or explanatory inversion, account for all sustained and high impact modern major Mass Media stories without any exceptions.

The one I wish to draw attention to is: 3. Good presented as Good for a bad reason 

This I would apply to any movement advocating Freedom, Free Speech and Free Expression; and to any and all groupings with a negative agenda of ‘anti’, ‘protest’ and ‘resistance’. 

The simple reason is that there is no neutrality in the modern world; so there is no freedom – and in The West there is only the choice to follow, or to oppose, Jesus Christ. 

Any-thing which says it just opposes ‘evil’; which presents itself as a neutral Good – any-thing which presents itself as merely-permissive (asking for generic freedom, human rights, for universal allowing) – any-thing which is supposedly just common sense, or pragmatism, or ‘decent’…

Any and all such will in practice, for sure, (whether immediately or soon) be differentially interpreted and differentially enforced against Christians; and Christians-only.   

Of course, we can make this even more simple by noting that the inversive nature of evil is such that we know what they mean by freedom is always a form of material restriction. Freedom of speech gave us hate speech laws, anti-BDS laws, thought policing, and banishment from the public square. Equality gave us the inability to escape from Wakandan crime. Tolerance gave us the inability to have standards.

A wise old admiral once told me that in politics, it all comes down to Aristotle vs Plato in the end. But while that’s true, it’s also incomplete. In reality, everything, including politics, comes down to Jesus Christ vs Satan. That’s why non-Christians, even those whose hearts and minds are in the right place, sooner or later always end up being surprised and confused concerning the objectives and actions of the “Marxists” or “the Left” or “the Jews” or “the Nazis” or “the bankers” or whoever their particular bugaboo happens to be.

Only Christians understand why every converged organization eventually ends up advocating sexual freedom, one-world government, homosexuality, transgenderism, child abuse, and human sacrifice, usually in that order, over time. This is because the point that they are all converging to is open worship of the god of this world.

Junior Classics support

 

So, we’re ready to start addressing the problems of those backers who have not yet received either a) their hardcover editions of Vols I-III or b) the information required to download their ebook editions of Vols I-III. Please note that it is always important to send us the information we require, such as your current email and physical addresses, and to not block the information conduits that permit us to send the relevant information to you.

For example, two people actually UNSUBCRIBED from the Castalia email list after receiving the information about the three ebook editions. I fully expect to hear from both of them down the road, complaining that they haven’t received information about volumes IV through X, and I will not be even remotely apologetic. How do they think we’re going to send them the information they want if they are actively preventing us from providing it to them. What I strongly suggest doing is to whitelist both library AT castaliahouse DOT com and castaliajuniorclassics AT outlook DOT com in order to maximize your ability to receive the relevant information from us without being interrupted by the various technologies involved.
So, if you are a Junior Classics backer and have not received the email with the download information for the ebooks, please email castaliajuniorclassics AT outlook DOT com and be sure to provide the following four things in this order on different lines:
  • your email address
  • your first name
  • your last name
  • your backing edition (digital, single, first three, hardcover, leather)
If you are a Junior Classics backer of the hardcover editions and have not received one or more of your physical books, please please email castaliajuniorclassics AT outlook DOT com and provide the following information in this order on different lines.
  • your email address
  • your first name
  • your last name
  • your backer ID or Arkhaven order number
  • your current address in the following format: Address, City, State/Province, Zip, Country
If you received your books, but they were damaged or egregiously misprinted, please do the same, along with a picture of the damaged book or books. We need the photo evidence in order to have the printer send replacements. If you have any questions, please send them to castaliajuniorclassics AT outlook DOT com.
And in doing so, please try to not be excessively stupid, or worse, waste everyone’s time with the Smart Boy routine and trying to find a way to somehow be “confused” by these directions so that you can show how smart you are by asking for a “clarification”.
UPDATE: If you downloaded an ebook on the first day and it has a missing section, just download it again. The 001 versions have been replaced with 002.
TECHNICAL SUPPORT FAQ
Q: What if I didn’t “back” the campaign on Indiegogo, but I “bought” the books on Arkhaven? What should I do? I’m so confused! Can you please clarify this for me?
A: You’re still a backer. Shut the fuck up and follow the directions.
Q: What if my book wasn’t “damaged” but I got two volume IIs and no volume I. What should I do? I’m so confused! Can you please clarify this for me?
A: The wrong book counts as a “damaged” book. Shut the fuck up and follow the directions.
Q: You shouldn’t talk to customers like that! Don’t you know that the customer is always right? In my day, we accepted returns for nothing more than a firm handshake and looking the customer straight in the eye.
A: OK Boomer. Unfortunately, you will need to provide proof that you are fully vaccinated for COVID-19 before we can read your emails.

Georgia can’t force economic support

A Georgia judge has confirmed what everyone already knew.

A Georgia law created to discourage the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement has been ruled as “unconstitutional,” in a move that activists are celebrating as a “major victory.”
The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed on behalf of journalist Abby Martin – formerly the host of Breaking the Set on RT. Martin refused to sign a contract pledging that she would refrain from boycotts against Israel ahead of a planned speaking engagement at Georgia Southern University in February 2020.
When Martin refused to comply, her appearance was canceled and she later filed a lawsuit with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).
Judge Mark Cohen wrote in his ruling that Georgia’s law “prohibits inherently expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.” 

Anti-BDS laws are unconstitutional, anti-American, and ridiculously counterproductive. I refuse to boycott Israel myself, and I will certainly continue to publish Israeli authors, but I absolutely support the right of every American, and everyone else on the planet, to do so if they see fit, because the alternative is literal economic slavery that is far more offensive to American sensibilities than any swastika or offensive free speech.

Every anti-BDS law should be and will be struck down. There is absolutely no excuse or justification for them, especially if you happen to support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish nation-state.

Brer BLM and the briar patch

Perhaps Black Lives Matter is on to something. Who could possibly question their position that racists should be banned from living near people from ethnic minorities.

Outlining the party’s manifesto in what was her first interview with a national publication, she called for a national register of alleged racists that would ban them from living near people from ethnic minorities.

This would include people guilty of ‘micro-aggressions’, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as ‘indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalised group’.

‘It’s similar to the sex offenders register,’ she told MailOnline. ‘If you were to be racially abusive to someone, [the register] would question whether someone is fit enough to hold a particular job where their bias could influence another person’s life.

‘A lot of racism happens at work and places of education in a micro-aggressive way. If you exhibit an element of bias at work, you should probably receive a warning first [before later being added to the register] so people know in future that you hold these views.’

Ms Johnson said inclusion on the list would mean you could be excluded from ‘certain fields’ of employment – or even banned from living near people from ethnic minorities.

‘If you live in a majority-coloured neighbourhood you shouldn’t reside there because you’re a risk to those people – just like if a sex offender lived next to a school he would be a risk to those children,’ she said.

Perhaps we could call the place that the racist microaggressive people live “Europe” and reserve a very large safe place for all the members of all the marginalised groups where the racists wouldn’t present a risk to them. And we could call it “Africa” “Wakanda”. We would, of course, maintain a very strict exclusionary policy, so as to prevent any risks to the Wakandan children.

Don’ trow me inna dat dere briar patch, Brer BLM!

The Nationalist Right is so inevitable, even its enemies embrace its core policies.