Author: VD

I don’t really understand why obviously useless people like “newsreaders” and “presenters” are surprised that they’re eventually going to be replaced by AI. I mean, they were expensive and they never actually did anything that required any thought whatsoever anyhow.

OFF Radio Krakow in Poland has sparked outrage after firing several presenters and replacing them with artificial intelligence (AI) programmed to interview high-profile dead people using AI-generated responses.

On Oct. 22, OFF Radio Krakow launched its radical initiative featuring a simulated interview with the late poet Wieslawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. The AI-hosted segment employed a computer-generated voice designed to mimic Szymborska’s tone as she “discussed” this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature following approval from the poet’s foundation.

The foundation believes the innovative presentation could help introduce the works of Szymborska to new audiences, but the response from the public and media has been largely critical. Fans and cultural advocates argue that the use of AI to impersonate deceased individuals crosses an ethical line and threatens the integrity of journalism.

Especially since so much news is taken directly from the Associated Press, it should be trivial for the average television station to replace all of its “newsreaders” and “anchors” with a quality AI system, which will also save a considerable amount of money on salaries for people who have little to offer except mellifluous voices and good hair.

In fact, this is obviously the way that UATV News is eventually going to go; we’ve already done a few modest experiments in that vein. But animation obviously isn’t the way to do it, because there is too much animation and artwork involved. It has to be something that looks like a real human newsreader and there are already some decent AI services that deliver that. If there is any interest in supporting a project like this, let us know in the comments.

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John Carter points out that the mainstream narrative that claims men don’t read is false. It’s just that men don’t read what the converged and feminized mainstream publishers re publishing.

There is a close connection between the untruths that “men don’t read” and that “the right can’t create”. The left does not have some lock on literary creativity – HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Robert A Heinlein, Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, and numerous other genre-defining titans would have been very amused to hear that “the right can’t create”.

What actually happens is that the left takes over production, distribution, and promotion channels, and then ensures that only their books are published, stocked, marketed, and given awards. There is no creativity whatsoever involved in this strategy. It is simply low animal cunning and venal social power games.

As with every other instance of the left murdering an institution and wearing it as a skinsuit, the result is the precipitous collapse of the ability of that institution to fulfill its social function, followed in short order by the collapse of its prestige as the general public starts tuning the corrupted institution out.

“Men don’t read” the insipid sermons the big publishers are selling, and “the right doesn’t create” anything the left will consider publishing. Meanwhile there is a quiet literary Renaissance happening in independent publishing, and men are reading it in droves.

He’s correct. I’m absolutely astonished how many men subscribe to the Castalia Library substack and read the serialized excerpts from THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY every single day. We usually average over 1,000 post views, which is around 50 percent of our total subscriber base, and this is not dumbed-down modern drivel either, but serious history published by the leading academics at Cambridge University in the early 20th Century.

Today’s selection, the 127th from Volume One, concerned the defeat of the barbarian usurper Maximus by the rightful Augustus, Theodosius. Just a single paragraph is much more interesting than the entire fall-winter line from Tor Books.

It would seem that emissaries of Maximus had spread disaffection among the Germans in the eastern army, but a plot to murder Theodosius was disclosed in time and the traitors were cut down in the swamps to which they had fled for refuge. The Emperor advanced to Siscia on the Save; here, despite their inferiority in numbers, his troops swam the river and charged and routed the enemy.

Furthermore, the modern descendants of yesteryear’s right-wing greats are anathema to the mainstream publishing industry. For example, I am almost certainly the closest thing the entire publishing industry has to JRR Tolkien’s landmark work in epic fantasy, and yet you will not find a single mainstream reference to Summa Elvetica, A Throne of Bones, or A Sea of Skulls in any mainstream publication devoted to modern fiction. Brandon Sanderson, Larry Correia, and George R.R. Martin are the best that they can do, and the former two have more than one foot out of the mainstream industry already.

So how do they expect men to read when they deny men what they have always enjoyed reading?

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In what is arguably the least surprising news ever, the new Labour government of Great Britain is raising taxes to historic levels.

In a massive package that left Westminster stunned, Chancellor Rachel Reeves shifted the country decisively towards a European high-tax, high spending model. The £40billion scale of the tax hikes – despite Keir Starmer previously claiming there was no need to raise revenue beyond the £8billion in the Labour manifesto – was even greater than thought. It rivals 1993’s eyewatering revenue-raiser in the wake of Black Wednesday, and takes the burden on Brits to a record 38 per cent of GDP. Insisting the country had ‘voted for change’ and it is time to ‘rebuild’, Ms Reeves vowed to ‘invest, invest, invest’.

The tax burden is actually projected to rise higher than the post-WWII levels. It’s a good thing they’ve got all those Jamaican, African, and Pakistani immigrants who we’re assured are so good for the economy, or the British people would certainly be in a pickle!

These increased taxes should mean the British people will be able to continue funding their war in Ukraine, at least as long as there are still some Ukrainians left to sacrifice to the Russian war machine. Checkmate, Putin!

UPDATE: It may be worse than we thought. It may be worse than we imagined. We may be looking at an economic Hultgreen-Curie situation here.

In her 77-minute speech, Ms Reeves said she is ‘deeply proud’ to be the first woman to be Chancellor in the 900 year history of the role, and the first woman to deliver a Budget.

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It shouldn’t be too hard for the weaponized autists to figure out who were the FBI’s two honeypots inserted “at a high level” into the Trump presidential campaign in 2015.

The House Judiciary Committee is examining a whistleblower report that the FBI targeted Donald Trump soon after he announced his presidential campaign in June 2015, an off-the-books operation ordered by FBI Director James B. Comey that predated the Crossfire Hurricane operation.

An FBI agent involved in the probe revealed the off-the-books criminal investigation on Tuesday in a protected disclosure sent to the committee. The whistleblower disclosure said two female FBI undercover agents infiltrated Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign at high levels and were directed to act as “honeypots” while traveling with Mr. Trump and his campaign staff on the trail.

A review of campaign photographs taken on the plane will probably be sufficient to identify them. Presumably the two honeypots would be young enough, and attractive enough, to stand out from the legitimate campaign workers. And both of them almost certainly would have had affairs with one or more of the workers.

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SFWA continues to be the gift that just keeps on giving, as embracing diversity bites them in their very ample, non-binary backsides. Fandom Pulse covers SFWA’s latest scandal:

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki was hailed as one of Africa’s rising star voices in science fiction. He had been propped up by the publishing establishment as an author from Nigeria with an “authentic take” on writing because of his background. He won a World Fantasy Award, was nominated for multiple Hugos and other awards, and was propped up as a diversity token as establishment publishing is desperate for black talent in science fiction.

Ekpeki loved to use his clout to pay for his vacations. He opened different projects on GoFundMe each time he received an award nomination organized by serial clout goblin Jason Sanford, who was all too happy to virtue signal for the African writer. One was even to raise alleged legal fees for a visa, culminating in over $15,000 of donations from sci-fi fandom. 

His clout as a black short fiction author eventually landed him a position on The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association’s board as a board member at large.

SFWA has been under fire these last few months, with multiple board members stepping down amid a scandal involving a disabled employee who complained about accessibility and was ignored by the board and President Jeffe Kennedy. As SFWA records its election for a new president, a new scandal has broken out with this Nigerian board member.

On October 27th, SFWA reported they removed Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki as a board member due to multiple ethics complaints surrounding the African author. These allegations were listed by Locus Magazine, posting the full text from an author named Erin Cairns, alleging the black author stole a story from her. The full text of her complaint is 78 pages long, but it details an account starting in 2022 in which Ekpeki reached out to her allegedly to exploit her. After months of leading her on, Ekpeki allegedly asked Cairns to co-write a story with him. Cairns claims she wrote an entire story, and Ekpeki changed some of the names to sound more authentically black in the story before submitting it to a “black voices”-themed magazine.

The catch is that Ekpeki didn’t list Cairns as a co-writer but submitted it solely as his own work, according to Cairns.

On 10/27/2024, the Board met to discuss multiple ethics complaints regarding Director-at-Large Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki after hearing statements from various parties involved. Mr. Ekpeki was also given a chance to speak to the Board regarding these complaints. After due consideration, and in compliance with Article V(5)(iii) of the SFWA Bylaws, the Board voted unanimously to remove Director-at-Large Ekpeki from his position on the SFWA Board of Directors for good and sufficient cause, effective immediately.

The Board will not be answering questions on this matter to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Here’s the punchline: the board still hasn’t expelled Elpeki from SFWA. So they’ve got convicted pedos, unconvicted pedos who are NAMBLA members, and now plagiarists as members in good standing, to say nothing of all the wannabes who have never even written, nor published, a single SF novel… and they’re still pretending to have expelled me even though the required membership vote never took place.

No wonder publishers pay no attention to the organization.

UPDATE: This community alone is considerably larger than the active SFWA membership now. The science fiction writers of yore never should have listened to Anne McCaffrey. It’s not a coincidence that Diversity, Inclusivity, and Inclusion spells DIE.

Less than three hundred members bothered to vote for the president of the club and approximately one hundred wrote in a candidate for secretary as the one candidate who was on the ballot withdrew, not wanting to do work for the club in this environment. 

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A former fan shares his thoughts about Neil Gaiman, who has maintained his very uncharacteristically public silence for three months now:

Gaiman was careful to cultivate a very different public image. His deceptions go back a long way. His story about how he skipped university to carve out a career as a freelance journalist and author in London tends to miss out the bit where he was working as an auditor for the Church of Scientology. There’s no doubting his talent, but he turns out to have been a monumental self-promoting bullshitter all along. Only worse.

Neil Gaiman never had the talent he pretended to have. I think it’s quite likely that he never had the success that he is assumed to have had either. (See: L. Ron Hubbard). And he observably never had the human decency that he pretended to have. The only thing that was genuine, in the end, was his Imposter Syndrome, because he always was an imposter from the start.

The knock on the door… it finally arrived.

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Our friends at Autarch have launched an already-successful campaign for their latest addition to the ACKS II role-playing game: a 256-page Treasure Tome.

The Adventurer Conqueror King System™ Imperial Imprint (ACKS II) is the recently-released new edition of the acclaimed bestselling fantasy role-playing game. The pages of ACKS II offer you everything you need to enjoy epic fantasy campaigns with a sweeping scope. Whether you want to crawl through dungeons, experiment with alchemy, crossbreed monsters, run a merchant emporium, raise an undead legion, or conquer an empire, ACKS II supports your playstyle. Crowdfunded here on Kickstarter in November 2023, ACKS II raised over $330,000 from almost 2,000 backers.

Today, we are crowdfunding the ACKS II Treasure Tome. The first sourcebook for ACKS II system, the ACKS II Treasure Tome is a 256-page compendium of over 1,000 brand-new magic items for old-school fantasy campaigns. Designed with all the rigorous detail and careful study expected of the Adventurer Conqueror King System Imperial Imprint, the ACKS II Treasure Tome is easily adapted for use with other D20-based fantasy RPGs such as North Wind Adventure’s Hyberborea, OSR Publishing’s Dragonslayer, and the Arcane Library’s Shadowdark.

And in other crowdfunding news, HYPERGAMOUSE has successfully crushed its third stretch goal, which means that two new variant cover editions have been added, one paperback and one hardcover, featuring the original art of Ademir Leal and an artist to be announced soon!

You can find both variant cover editions as campaign add-ons.

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I’m not unsympathetic to those who argue that it is pointless to vote in the fraudulent exercises known as the U.S. presidential elections. I’ve logically proven that any one vote literally cannot make a difference in any circumstances myself, even without taking the Uniparty into account. But sometimes, exigencies supply imperatives.

By the bowels of Cthulhu, I beseech thee, vote and vote again. As many times as they will permit thee, vote, dammit, by all means, vote for Donald Trump!

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Simplicius notes that the media has descended from propping up the Official Narrative to full-bore, nonstop lying about every single front of WWIII:

It’s actually incredible when you step back a moment and consider how the West lives increasingly in a total fantasy construct. On every global issue or flashpoint, Western media no longer exercises even the barest scruples, instead blanketly reporting the most fantastical tales with zero corroboration. In Iran we’re expected to believe Israel “decimated” the entire Iranian air defense network, countless major labs and buildings, despite zero proof apart from a single grainy satellite photo that shows a slight discoloration somewhere—far less proof than we got from Iran’s much more massive strike on Israeli bases during True Promise 2.0.

In Georgia, Western press reports with shameless authority that the election was ‘stolen’ despite no credible evidence. The entire Western order has at this point in its lurid, terminal panic given up on not only truth, but any and all foundational values that have made Western civilization what it was. Threats, lies, and propaganda are flung with no accountability or attempt at justification; it seems we’ve entered the rapid parabolic singularity point of the ‘post-truth’ era in the West. Just like how the Federal Reserve must now exponentiate its printing cycles just to stave off collapse, Western intelligentsia and its corrupt crony political class must now likewise balloon their brazen lies to infinity just to keep from drowning in them as if the buoyancy of volume will keep them up.

Granted, the above is just a general observation on the state of things—particularly in the pre-election news-cycle the sheer unrepentant nature of the gaslighting now witnessed daily is unprecedented.

Clown World is getting increasingly desperate. Why 10,000 or 30,000 North Korean “special forces” would ever justify giving nuclear-capable missiles to Ukraine makes zero sense when one considers how many NATO “mercenaries” have been fighting in Ukraine for the last two years. It’s beyond obvious who is running Clown World PR when its military alliance is both a) surprised and b) offended at the unfairness when its enemy makes effective use of its own allies.

A few weeks ago, I said we’d know if the IDF was winning its war against Hezbollah or not by the media coverage. I was there in 1982, I remember how every advance was televised, just as every big airstrike in Lebanon is on the front page of the news sites now. The complete absence of information tends to indicate that while the air war against an organization with neither an air force nor air defenses is proceeding without interruption, the ground war has completely failed. The media gaslighting is such that it this point, it would be less of a surprise if it is eventually announced that Hezbollah’s ground forces are entering northern Israel than for the IDF to reach the Litani River.

And the reports about the airstrike on Iran is that the initial wave of fighter-bombers who were supposed to take out the radar installations turned back before they even reached the Iranian border because they were radar-locked despite their stealth technology. This may or may not be true, and certainly there are no images of Israeli F-35s being shot down, but for one reason or another, the bombing for which the neocons have been shrieking for the last 23 years turned out to be more similar to President Clinton lobbing a few cruise missiles at some tents in the desert than the fire-bombing of Dresden.

Things are definitely heating up, so hopefully the media’s wall of silence about what’s actually taking place will start to collapse as quickly, and as comprehensively, as the Ukrainian defenses now are.

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While this Kuwaiti attempt to control all finances is almost certainly going to end in literal flames, there can be no doubt that Clown World would love to install the Kuwaiti system in every country it rules:

Kuwait has forced over one million citizens to hand over their biometric data in one of the most extreme pushes for digital ID. Kuwait introduced a national electronic ID (eID) that they say will assist with identification verification, digital signatures, E-government access, and the secure exchange of data. The deadline to file for this mandatory program was September 30 and the consequences for failing to comply were swift.

On October 1, the Ministry of Interior announced that those who failed to submit their data would be prohibited from all electronic services such as withdrawals, transfers, and account transfers. One cannot even withdraw cash. Around 35,000 people have been blocked out of their bank accounts and are unable to even view the balance. A few weeks later, those in noncompliance has their electronic bank cards deactivated. Visa, MasterCard, and K-Net all abided by the government’s rule.

Beginning on November 1, The Kuwait Banking Association stated it will implement a “complete block” on all accounts, which means one cannot even withdraw funds if they go to the bank in person. Expatriates have until December 31 to submit their biometric registration.

Notice that there isn’t one word of protest out of all the organizations that profess to be dedicated to human liberty, democracy, and the will of the people. This is far more dictatorial and far more dystopian than anything that any previous government has ever done to its own people. At this point, trusting the banking system to simply fulfill what used to be its primary function requires the complete absence of all brain activity.

Out of order will come chaos.

From SG, Happy #HaikuTober from Klaus and the Gang

Give us your thumbprint
Or we take all your money.
You will own nothing.

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