Author: VD

“A thundering defeat”

President Trump is overtly flexing on the hapless Biden crime family

Donald Trump said Joe Biden should be jailed and boasted he is leading in early voting during his first of two campaign stops Saturday in Muskegon, Michigan.  

The president said the ‘Biden family is a criminal enterprise’ and called his rival a ‘national security risk’ and ‘corrupt politician’ as he referenced the New York Post story of Hunter Biden’s emails that raised questions about Biden’s Ukraine dealings.  

Trump also went after the state’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer – who was almost kidnapped in a recent plot – sending his raucous crowd into chants calling for the two Democrats to be ‘locked up’

Despite polls showing he is trailing the Democrat, Trump claimed he was out front in early voting and told the sea of MAGA caps he was aiming for 12 years in office.  

Trump then went on to mock the idea of replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day and hit out at protesters who have gathered nationwide calling for racial equality, saying that seeing them being ‘pushed about’ by federal agents was ‘beautiful’…. 

He boasted that ‘we’re leading – early voting’ and Democrats needed to be shown a ‘thundering defeat at the ballot box.’ ‘And by the way, it seems to be happening,’ the president said.

He knows he’s going to win. And the media knows that Biden is guilty as Hell. 

Game over

Thomas Wictor calls it:

Game over.

@realDonaldTrump will be reelected in a landslide.

For the first time in American history, the Republicans have beaten the Democrats in new-voter registration.

We’re nearing the peak of demoralization season, so we should see the polls start falling back to a more modest Biden lead in the next two weeks to reflect this reality.

Reviving Arkhaven

It isn’t just DevGame that is getting active again, although we’re already seeing some incredible results out of the revival of the game developer site, by which I mean it looks like we are going to be publishing not one, but two, game design books by a truly legendary game designer. I’m referring to the Arkhaven Comics blog, which will now be featuring the talents of the Dark Herald and comics writer Jon Del Arroz on a regular basis. 

The Dark Herald has already written a highly informative initial post on Eastern Story Structure:

Hakawati, is the Arabic tradition of story telling wherein each story must have and teach a moral lesson.  I suspect this tradition is more Middle-Eastern than specifically Arabian because the story of Jonah fits perfectly within its structure.

Jonah’s story is rather unsatisfying to a Westerner, if you read the whole thing

Jonah is ordered by God to go to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and deliver a command from Him to stop sinning.  Jonah, like all of his people and well, everyone else who had come into contact with Assyria wants them all dead. So he refused to deliver God’s message and ran away to sea.  A terrible storm came up while the ship was at sea. The crew drew lots to see who was to be sacrificed to appease the waters.  The never-lucky Jonah lost and was chucked over the side.  God sent a whale to swallow Jonah.  Jonah repented and God had the whale spit, Jonah, on to a shoreline that had decent access to Nineveh.  Jonah delivered the message to the hated Assyrians and then went to a nearby hill to watch God’s wrath descend on Nineveh.  And it didn’t.  

The End. 

When I was in Sunday school the whale part of the story was the only thing that our teacher concentrated on. Mostly because a giant whale story would keep squirming seven-year-olds occupied while their parents had coffee and donuts after the service. It worked because that part of the story was the closest thing that conformed to the western idea of the three-act story structure with an introduction, an inciting incident, rising tension, climax, and then denouement.  

The original purpose of the story however wasn’t to entertain, it was to teach. You aren’t entitled to any special reward on this Earth just because you did what God told you to.

The dominant religion in an area strongly influences that area’s story-telling traditions and story-structures.

Christianity has been the dominant religion in the West for the past 1,500 years or so.  Give or take a few centuries depending on your physical location.  Conflict is central to the faith.  If you are a Christian, you are fighting Satan.  If you fail at the fight you go to Hell.  Win that fight and self-improvement will occur but it is a side-effect, not the goal.  The goal is salvation and you don’t have to be the wisest of the wise in order to saved. 

Buddhism is the dominant religion in East Asia.  Buddhism at its center is self-improvement for its own sake.  There is no conflict driving it forward.  If you screwup in this life you slide down the ladder into a lower form of life. Be that a lower caste, a woman, all the way down to animals and insects.  Improve yourself enough and you will achieve Enlightenment. And not have to be reborn into the world of suffering and desire anymore.

In Buddhism you absolutely have to be wisest of the wise.  Achievement is a requirement to reach Nirvana, and this has influenced all aspects of their societies. Especially with regards to storytelling and it’s concomitant tropes.

Read the whole thing there. And if you enjoy comics, add it to your daily bookmarks.

Proof by /pol/

 /pol/ is providing links to a zipfile containing some of the emails between Vadim Pozharskyi and Hunter Biden. There is nothing too terribly incriminating on this batch, but they appear to be legitimate. Which, of course, tends to signify that the New York Post story is going to be publicly substantiated in short order. One example:

———- Forwarded message ———-

From: Vadim Pozharskyi  

Date: Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 5:04 AM 

Subject: Re: Children passport scan copies To: Hunter Biden , Sebastian Momtazi< @rosemontcapital.com>, Devon Archer , Katie Dodge @rosemontseneca.com>

Gents, Hope, you are well. I am glad to let you know that we’ve already booked your tickets as per our last discussion. 

With this in mind, in order to buy tickets for the kids, I would be needing their passport scan copies. 

I would really appreciate it if you could kindly forward them to me as soon as you can for us finalize the arrangements!

Looking forward to our trip and seeing you all soon!

Best, Vadym 

— 

Katie Dodge Executive Assistant / Office Manager

Rosemont Seneca Partners

1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW,  #705 Washington, DC  20007

And more emails are being leaked already, in this case, related to China.

This is why UATV is necessary

 In case you still haven’t subscribed to Unauthorized because YouTube content is free:

YouTube has scrubbed many popular “QAnon” and independent news channels from its platform after announcing new rules that prohibit what it deems to be “harmful conspiracy theories.” The channels collectively had millions of subscribers and some of the many channels that were removed during this purge include:

  • X22 Report (952,000 subscribers)
  • SGTreport (630,000 subscribers)
  • Edge of Wonder (467,000 subscribers)
  • Praying Medic (391,000 subscribers)
  • And We Know (385,000 subscribers)
  • Amazing Polly (375,000 subscribers)
  • Joe M (367,000 subscribers)
  • Dollar Vigilante (304,000 subscribers)
  • Mouthy Buddha (296,000 subscribers)
  • JustInformed Talk (281,000 subscribers)
  • RedPill78 (269,000 subscribers)
  • The Patriot Hour (248,000 subscribers)
  • In Pursuit of Truth (242,000 subscribers)
  • Destroying the Illusion (238,000 subscribers)
  • TRUreporting (215,000 subscribers)
  • Alice Down The RabbitHole (174,000 subscribers)
  • Spaceshot76 (159,000 subscribers)
  • World Alternative Media (154,000 subscribers)
  • McAllisterTV (127,000 subscribers)
  • Sarah Westall (125,000 subscribers)
  • Radio-Québec (120,000 subscribers)
  • Truth and Art TV (113,000 subscribers)
  • Dustin Nemos (113,000 subscribers)
  • Blessed To Teach (109,000 subscribers)
  • Woke Societies (108,000 subscribers)
  • Stroppy Me (83,400 subscribers)
  • Patriots’ Soapbox News Network (80,000 subscribers)
  • Angel Wallace (63,000 subscribers)
  • Titus Frost (44,400 subscribers)

YouTube claims that it’s introducing this new policy to remove conspiracy content that’s “used to justify real-world-violence” – a claim that’s similar to those used by several other tech giants when justifying their arbitrary QAnon bans. For example, Facebook framed its QAnon ban as a crackdown on “potential violence.”

Under YouTube’s new policy, content that “targets an individual or group with conspiracy theories that have been used to justify real-world violence” are banned. Of course, YouTube doesn’t explain how it determines when a conspiracy theory is being used to justify real-world violence.

Subscribing to a free channel under SJW control is not going to accomplish anything. Supporting a channel that is providing a save haven to creators who are unauthorized by the thought police will.

The better they are, the harder they fall

 A new historical study entitled “Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past” reaches some very similar conclusions to my own predictions for the USA:

Societies with ‘good’ governments like the Roman Empire and China’s Ming Dynasty fell harder than tyrannical dictatorships, a new study suggests.  

When ‘good’ governments – those that provided goods and services for their people and did not starkly concentrate wealth and power – fell apart, they broke down more intensely, US researchers say. 

Although good governments may have been able to sustain themselves longer than corrupt regimes, they tended to suffer a more catastrophic collapse when new leaders undermined social contracts with the people.

It was two British ministers, Andrew Reed and James Matheson, and not Alexis De Toqueville, who wrote: “America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like a morning cloud.” America has already ceased to be either great or good, indeed, she has ceased to be America and is now a perverse Pharisatanic empire ruling over a polyglot collection of diverse peoples.

But as America’s government was once both very good and managed to disperse wealth and power to a historically unprecedented degree, this study suggests that the coming breakdown is going to be more intense than even the most pessimistic observer tends to anticipate.

The Cookie polls

I reprehensively neglected to mention the all-important cookie polls in my recent Darkstream on alternative election indicators:

The real winner of the 2020 election might be this Pennsylvania bakery.

A family-owned bakery in the town of Hatboro claims that its election-themed cookies — which are currently flying off the rack — have accurately predicted the outcome of the past three presidential elections.

So far, they say sales indicate a clear leader for the 2020 race, too.

Lochel’s Bakery, located in Montgomery County just north of Philadelphia, had launched its most recent “cookie poll” about six weeks back, offering both “Trump 2020” cookies and “Biden 2020” cookies in red and blue, respectively.

“So far as of 10 a.m. Trump is in the lead 3 to 1,” she told Fox News on Friday morning.

The original cookie poll, in Red Wing, Minnesota, concurs:

Opinions be what they may, but the only acceptable answer here comes piled high with red, white, and blue frosting, and can be found in Red Wing. Each costs $4, and will be counted as a vote for president. Sort of.

Every four years, Hanisch Bakery and Coffee Shop celebrates democracy in the sweetest way possible: by hosting the Presidential Cookie Poll. “It’s a fun election poll that just happens to be pretty darn accurate for some reason,” says Bill Hanisch, the establishment’s chief manager and owner.

In the 1920s, the bakery was called Quandt’s. It’s undergone several ownership and name changes since then, but Hanisch is sure the Braschler family conceived of the cookie poll we recognize today during the Mondale-Reagan election because he worked under them starting when he was 15 years old. Though he’s not certain why the poll first ran back in 1984, the current owner bets it was a simple move to drum up business.

When Hanisch bought the bakery in 2007, he understood he would also become ringmaster for a unique political circus that’s getting more unwieldy each election cycle. So far this year, Trump’s cookies have outsold Biden’s by a mile. 

The cookies have spoken. Trumpslide 2020. 

Division and Qanon

It seems to me that the mainstream media usually celebrates things that tend to tear families apart, things like divorce and immigration and transgenderism and interracial relationships. I wonder why tearing families apart has suddenly become a bad thing in its eyes?

QAnon can be traced back to a series of 2017 posts on 4chan, the online message board known for its mixture of trolls and alt-right followers. The poster was someone named “Q,” who claimed to be a government insider with Q security clearance, the highest level in the Department of Energy. QAnon’s origin matters less than what it’s become, an umbrella term for a loose set of conspiracy theories ranging from the false claim that vaccines cause illness and are a method of controlling the masses to the bogus assertion that many pop stars and Democratic leaders are pedophiles.

The choose-your-own-adventure nature of QAnon makes it compelling to vulnerable people desperate for a sense of security and difficult for Twitter and Facebook to control, despite their efforts. It’s becoming increasingly mainstreamed as several QAnon-friendly candidates won congressional primaries. And the FBI has warned that it could “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”

As QAnon has crept into the news, it’s become a testament to our age of political disinformation, not to mention easy online comedic currency. But what’s often forgotten in stories and jokes are the people behind the scenes who are baffled at a loved one’s embrace of the “movement,” and who struggle to keep it from tearing their families apart.

Then again, I seem to recall that someone else once came to tear families apart. Perhaps division is not such a bad thing…

Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

– Luke 12:51-53

An important lesson in multiculturalism

I tend to doubt it was the lesson for the day that the teacher had in mind, but it will indubitably prove an indelible one.

A parent shouting Allahu Akbar and thought to be wearing an explosive vest has been shot dead by French police near Paris after allegedly beheading a school teacher with a knife.

The victim was said to have been a school teacher who had enraged parents by displaying cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to pupils.

A source told Le Parisien: ‘The victim had recently given a lesson to his students on freedom of expression and had shown the caricatures of Muhammad’.

This led to an enraged parent confronting the teacher with a kitchen knife, and then cutting his head off, said the source.

The real tragedy, of course, would be if the students were to develop an unfortunate antipathy for Muslims as a result of their cultural enrichment. 

UPDATE: Of course, the feckless French surrender monkey who purports to “lead” the country is still pushing idiotic civnattery.

‘He said the attack should not divide France because that is what the extremists want. We must stand all together as citizens.’    

Civnattery is a fraud. Nationalism, genuine nationalism, is the only cure for the multicultural disease.

Four game designers, two interviews

My recruitment efforts for high-quality additions to the DevGame site have already been rewarded beyond my reasonable expectations, as two veteran game developers have already agreed to become regular contributors. Restitutor Orbis, a game designer who is the newest contributor to DevGame, interviewed Chris Crawford, legendary game designer and founder of the Game Developers Conference, in 2005:

Eastern Front (1941) was one of Crawford’s most noteworthy creations so I decided to press him for details. “Eastern Front was a creative implementation of an obvious idea. ‘Let’s do a good wargame on a computer!’” he said. “Pulling it off involved an awful lot of creativity, but it required tactical creativity as opposed to strategic creativity.”

I was puzzled by what he meant. Crawford has a reputation for being outspoken, but it’s a cryptic sort of outspokenness, profound to the point of incomprehensibility. Talking to him can be like reading A Brief History of Time at 120 words a minute. You always feel like you’re missing something.

“Tactical creativity is implementation creativity. How do we build a good map? How do we move units around? How do we build a good AI system? You already know where you are going and you are just figuring out how to get there.”

“So would you say in today’s game industry we have a lot of tactical creativity and less strategic creativity?” I asked.

“Nowadays the stuff we call creative is tiny, tiny stuff. It’s hard to even call it creative at all. Technically, yes, I see a lot of creativity. But I see almost no design creativity in the stuff that’s coming out there.”

What was beginning to become apparent in 2005 is now completely obvious to everyone 15 years later. Read the whole thing. For my part, I interviewed Brad Wardell,  designer of Galactic Civilizations and publisher of Sins of a Solar Empire and Sorceror King, as part of the 2016 DevGame course:

VD: You’ve moved from doing science fiction with Galactic Civilizations into doing 4X fantasy with Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King. What were some of the challenges that were involved in moving from science fiction to fantasy?

Brad: The biggest one for us was going from a space-based game like Galactic Civilizations II to a land-based game like Fallen Enchantress. Specifically, the terrain. You are dealing with the ground. And that turned out to be a huge challenge for us because we had never had to deal with it before. We had never really run up against things like video memory or the limitations of DirectX in terms of how to make a mountain. You think about it, of course, but how you make something like a mountain can be limiting based on DirectX, because there’s only so many points you can put on there. So that turned out to be a huge hurdle for us, and that really bit us in the butt, because, at the time, we didn’t do our homework on what we could and couldn’t do with the current technology.

VD: Interesting. That’s very timely because we’re going to be getting into things like polygon count and so forth when we talk about art later today. Now, in the publishing world, the market for fantasy is considerably larger than the one for science fiction. Is that true in games as well, or do you find that science fiction usually outsells fantasy?

Brad: I read mostly science fiction myself. In the game arena, I would say science fiction tends to be a bit ahead of fantasy, only because the problem people run into with fantasy is that they think fantasy means medieval Europe with magic. And that’s not a just a problem in terms of the designer’s limits, it’s more the expectations of the public. If you move too far outside the box, you are punished for it in the marketplace. Whereas in science fiction, you have a little bit more room to breathe.

Even if you’re not a game developer, or a wannabe game developer, there is a good chance you’re going to learn a lot of interesting information from these interviews. And if you’re a gamer, you’re definitely going to want to add DevGame to your daily bookmarks list.