#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Leonard Nimoy, Spock of ‘Star Trek,’ Dies at 83. Death comes for us all in time. Even half-Vulcans.
Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.
Because this is what happens when you don’t:
Karen Memery (like memory but with an e as she explains), is just such a seamstress. She is the titular narrator of Elizabeth Bear’s latest steampunk adventure, Karen Memory (with an o and not an e). A prostitute at the Hôtel Ma Cherie, a high-class bordello in Seattle Rapid City in the late 1800s, Memery is dissatisfied with her job and her johns, longing for the prairie life she gave up when her father died….
Bear also gleefully subverts gender roles in Karen Memory. Not just with Karen and Priya’s lesbian relationship. She also introduces Crispin, the gay bouncer at the Hôtel Ma Cherie, and Miss Francina, one of the seamstresses who has a select client base. As Karen puts it:
“…the thing about Miss Francina is that Miss Francina’s got a pecker under her dress. But that ain’t nothing but God’s rude joke. She’s one of us girls every way that matters, and handy for a bouncer besides.”
So not only do we have three prominent gay characters, including the main protagonist and her love interest, but we also have a transgender character — the first I’ve run into in a 19th Century setting. And Karen’s plainspoken acceptance of Miss Francina, and those other societal outcasts who gravitate to the Hôtel Ma Cherie is probably the most refreshing part of the book.
Indeed, one of the major themes of Karen Memory seems to be the subversion of the dominant white male paradigm. Bear puts a variety of alternative lifestyles and minority role models on display, and fervently asserts that they too can be heroes in a fantasy novel. Madame Damnable in her quest for leadership of Seattle Rapid City against Bantle; the African-American Marshal Reeves, who has risen to a place of leadership despite his race (and actually Madame Damnable as well – Karen makes it clear that the powerful madame is also African-American by blood, if not by appearance); and Priya and Karen’s blossoming relationship, forbidden both as same-sex and interracial, are all examples.
Does that sounds like “loads of fun” to you? Because reading about a dissatisfied whore while being subjected to a sermon on the importance of diversity in sexual orientation, race, and transgenderism sounds about as much fun as listening to to SJWs drone on NPR about intersectionalism. I would genuinely rather read an IMF paper on the monetary policy of Zambia or Newton’s Principia. In Latin.
Loads of fun. That’s what they want to bring to the game industry too. Loads of fun. Now, you can either submit to this SJW shit, or you can help us keep it out of games and take back science fiction. What will it be?
UPDATE: Bandai Namco sensitively responds to SJW concerns by providing new armor for female characters Ivy and Amy. Happy now?
No, apparently not.
Anita Sarkeesian is not, by her own admission, a gamer. Nor is she a game developer, let alone a game designer. Kotaku quoted her as follows:
Sarkeesian mentioned her time in grad school, which I believe was the same time she was saying in that clip that she wasn’t a fan of games. “If you asked me at the time, I would probably have said I wasn’t a gamer,” she said. Under her breath she added: “I don’t even know if I want to say that now, but whatever.”
She’s not a gamer. She knows nothing about games. She is a classic SJW entryist, invading a culture to which she does not belong in order to change it according to her principles. Her list of “improvements”:
“Eight things developers can do to make games less shitty for women.”
My response, as a professional game developer, is simple and straightforward. Go to Hell. I don’t tell Anita Sarkeesian how to publicly media-whore herself for a living and she has no business telling me or any other game designer how to make the games we wish to make. Only one point would even theoretically improve any game in even a minor way, and it could be applied equally well to TV and movies, namely, point 6. What is the point of motion capturing a giraffe if you’re trying to portray a cheetah?
If she thinks my game, or any other game, is “shitty for women”, that’s her right. And it’s my right, and the right of every other single game designer and developer in the industry to tell her that I don’t give the smallest quantum of a damn what she thinks. It is also our right to continue ignoring her recommendations as we go about making the games we want to make rather than the games she would prefer made.
I am, however, willing to implement one of her suggestions. We will implement her point #7 in First Sword if Anita Sarkeesian volunteers to submit to a physical but non-sexual beating and have the painful sounds she makes in the course of that beating recorded. Solely in the interests of verisimilitude and making games less shitty for women, of course. That’s not a threat, it is merely an offer. She can, of course, refuse, and thereby inform the world that her commitment to her cause is rather less than total. Then we will continue doing exactly what we were doing before she started trying to tell us what to do.
However, her points do serve to demonstrate the utter futility, the utter idiocy, of giving in to her demands. First the complaint was that there weren’t any women. Now the complaint is that there aren’t enough women, they aren’t dressed right, they’re the wrong color, they don’t walk in the approved fashion, they make the wrong noises, and so on. It never ends.
Any game developer who is dumb enough to think the demands are going to stop there simply hasn’t been paying attention to anything that has happened in the last 50 years. Just say no to SJWs. Just say no to non-gamers trying to tell game industry professionals how to do their jobs.
It doesn’t matter what you think of Adrian Peterson. It doesn’t matter if you think he should be hung, drawn, and quartered for the crime of overdisciplining his son, for which he has already been dealt the legal consequences. All that matters is the basic legal principle that the worse commissioner in NFL history, Roger Goodell, violated, the principle of retroactivity:
The 16-page ruling from Judge David Doty that reinstates Vikings running back Adrian Peterson turns on one fairly simple conclusion: The NFL cannot apply its new personal conduct policy retroactively.
“There is no dispute that the Commissioner imposed Peterson’s discipline under the New Policy,” Judge Doty wrote. “It is also undisputed that in the [Ray] Rice arbitration, the hearing officer unequivocally recognized that the New Policy cannot be applied retroactively, notwithstanding the Commissioner’s broad discretion in meting out punishment under the CBA. . . . Consistent with that recognition, the Commissioner has acknowledged that he did not have the power to retroactively apply the New Policy: ‘The policy change was forward looking because the League is “required to provide proper notice.”‘ . . . Yet, just two weeks later, the Commissioner retroactively applied the New Policy to Peterson.”
In other words, Judge Doty concluded that the NFL was making it up as went along.
This is further evidence that the Sports Guy was right and Goodell is a dishonest man who is overmatched by his responsibilities, overly concerned with PR details that he should leave well alone, and fundamentally out of control. As for those who feign concern for women and children, and claim that the likes of Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson should be prevented from making a living, how can anyone possibly pretend that removing the ability of those who support them to do so going to help the victims of these petty domestic crimes.
And they are petty. It may, depending upon the circumstances, be wrong to punch a woman once. It is certainly too harsh to spank a child until he bleeds. But in a nation where not one single banker has been jailed despite the theft of literal trillions of dollars for a wide variety of shamelessly dishonest acts, it is ludicrous to pretend that these are the serious crimes that demand more significant punishments.
If you think you might be interested in supporting the First Sword kickstarter, or want to otherwise support what we’re doing on the game front, please sign up for Castalia House’s Game Development newsletter. All you need to do is enter your email address, no name or anything else is required. I think I can assure you that it will be, in the long run, even more significant than Castalia House. If Castalia was the first step, this is the second.
This is entirely separate from the New Release newsletter, so even if you subscribe to that for the books, you’ll need to sign up separately for the Game Development one. As with New Releases, you can expect we’ll be occasionally giving away free stuff to subscribers, although what that might be, I can’t possibly say. And obviously, there will be no spamming or selling of information.
Among the other benefits subscribers get is the chance to have first crack at all pre-Alpha, Alpha, and Beta testing. And just to show you the sort of thing we’ll be showing subscribers, here is a glimpse of a Warhammer Fantasy Battle-style tabletop we’re assembling. We’re still in the process of getting the miniatures into 3D; right now the High Elven Spearguard and the Elven Archers are complete and we’re working on Goblin Archers and Elven Cavalry. Eventually, this battlefield will feature nine regiments; the regiment featured below is the same one that can be seen on the right side of the stockade in the image above. The terrain will not normally be flat green, that is merely a toggle to show the extent of the playable “table”.
You will probably notice that these screenshots have absolutely nothing to do with gladiators. That’s because what we are designing is a 3D miniatures playing system. First Sword is only one of literally scores of games that we intend to be playable in our system. Anyhow, if it’s potentially of interest, sign up for the newsletter.
Once more, the techno-left is astonished by the discovery that giving more control to the federal government doesn’t work out in exactly the precision fine-tuned way they had planned in order to solve every problem everyone except white Christian men have with everything and implement a socially just paradise on this Earth:
For many months, EFF has been working with a broad coalition of advocates to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to adopt new Open Internet rules that would survive legal scrutiny and actually help protect the Open Internet. Our message has been clear from the beginning: the FCC has a role to play, but its role must be firmly bounded.
Two weeks ago, we learned that we had likely managed the first goal—the FCC is going to do the right thing and reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, giving it the ability to make new, meaningful Open Internet rules. But we are deeply concerned that the FCC’s new rules will include a provision that sounds like a recipe for overreach and confusion: the so-called “general conduct rule.”
It never seems to occur to them that the only thing that will ever work is to keep the government the fuck out of it. Once the principle of government “management” is established, the goose is cooked. The only question is to what extent, and to whose benefit.
Once you declare “the FCC has a role to play”, your part is done. You won’t get to tell them how to play it. The FCC will decide that for itself, thank you very much.
First off, please do not post OT comments early in a thread. That is implicitly saying “because I don’t care about X, I think everyone should be discussing Y, which is of more interest to me, instead”. You can certainly discuss Y if you like, by all means, but do so on your own blog. If you want to bring something to my attention, then email it to me.
Now speaking of bringing things to people’s attention that may or may not be of interest, Alpenwolf is in the process of preparing a major kickstarter for First Sword. It will take place in the April-May timeframe, and I hope the Dread Ilk will support it with all their well-renowned and oft-feared staunchness. As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve expanded the concept of First Sword to encompass a spectrum of gameplay formats for reasons that will eventually become clear. Among the various questions I’ve been wrestling with is the best way to keep everyone informed about its progress, since, as with Alpha Game, the development of a game is a highly specific subject in which not everyone is likely to be equally interested. The options are to post all of the development-related posts on the currently dormant Alpenwolf blog, to post them at Castalia House, or to post them here. Obviously, major announcements will be posted here, but I am aware most readers here are not interested in multiple gamedev-related posts per week here.
So, I’m leaning towards doing them at Castalia, since we want to build it up as more of a destination site, we already sell some games there, and we have one game designer, Ken Burnside of Ad Astra, already blogging there. I’d also like to let those of you who are on the Castalia House New Release newsletter list know about our upcoming Game Development newsletter. Please note that if you are subscribed to the former newsletter, you will NOT be automatically subscribed to the latter. We don’t spam and we don’t cross-mail either. However, we will be accepting subscriptions soon and will also provide a signup link to the new newsletter when we send the next New Release installment out. Anyone who is interested in any type of gaming from tabletop to tablet is going to be extremely interested in what we’re doing with First Sword, because it is not only a game, it is a game engine designed for a high degree of modding capability. As the image of Gragbol Man-killer, Orc Gladiator #1 will no doubt inform tabletop players, First Sword is the first example of a game system that will be playable on the physical tabletop, as a Vassal module, on a computer or mobile device, or as an ongoing campaign game.
This multi-tiered approach has long been a vision of mine, as the original version of Rebel Moon Revolution was designed to be both a 3D tactical shooter and a 2D strategy game. We created two levels of AI for precisely this purpose, dividing them into TacAI and StratAI so that the StratAI could be replaced by a human player moving 2D counters around on a map that was essentially the top-down version of the 3D environment. The movements served as triggers to send orders to the TacAI that replaced the orders otherwise provided by the StatAI. In retrospect, I doubt we would have been able to successfully pull that off even if GT Interactive didn’t go down the drain (taking both Fenris Wolf and Rebel Moon Revolution with it), partly due to time constraints and partly due to the fact that our StratAI programmer contracted cancer and died. But we are going to be able to pull it off here, because after learning from my past tendencies to design more than I could reasonably produce and bringing in some very smart and experienced new development partners, we’re applying the concept in a much simpler, much more easily accomplished fashion.
While we eventually hope to expand the concept to the full-blown multi-tiered squad-level combat game originally envisioned, in the meantime, we’re going to initially make this multi-tiered combat management gameplay work at the gladiatorial level. We’re putting together the various elements for the Kickstarter now, so if you’ve got any more thoughts concerning rewards you’d like to see, this is the time to throw them out there.
And finally, we’re happy to announce that the fourth issue of the Sci Phi Journal is now available in both EPUB and MOBI format at the Castalia House store. The first three issues have been very good and the fourth one looks like no exception. If you’d like to get caught up, issues One, Two, and Three are also available there. From a review of Issue #3:
“Suffice to say this is a thinking man’s SF magazine and is superbly chosen and edited by Jason Rennie.”
And as long as I’m in info dump mode, I may as well mention that ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT Book Two is progressing very well, I am ahead of the revised schedule, the cover is being designed, and the 850-page book will likely be published in November rather than December as previously announced. I can’t vouch for the quality myself, but I will say that the two early readers have said that it is better than A THRONE OF BONES.
Anonymous Conservative’s take on Donglerape and #GamerGate:
I just kept seeing this scenario, as I read through Vox’s post here. First, this woman’s amygdala is so accustomed to total ease and control that a guy makes a dongle joke to a friend at a computer conference, and she immediately takes offense. That is an amygdala unaccustomed to harshness. Then she asserts to the interviewer that she tweeted her horror, out of a fear that the guy sitting five rows away was going to rape her, in the middle of a conference of 2000 computer geeks. The interviewer asks why she didn’t think any of the 2,000 other conference goers would stop the rape and her response is that they are all white males, as if they might rape her too, for good measure, all because she is a black Jewish female. The narcissism, self absorption, and expectation that everyone give her whatever she wants has to be read to be believed.
You can tell, the way she says “I’m a black Jewish female,” over and over, that she has used that phrase a lot. In the context she applies it, it isn’t a logical, thought-out response. It is a conditioned response thrown out in response to any threat or challenge – the type of response which can only be conditioned through frequent repetition when resources are free, and everyone avoids the fight….
What these incidents should show you, is that we are beginning the transition from r to K, and the rules are changing. Gamergate is a great accomplishment, but it required motivation, and motivation required irritation. If this were the dot-com boom, I suspect those gamers would have been too busy making money and partaking of other sources of pleasure, to unite together and mount a fight. Games would have deteriorated as everything does under r-selection, but the gamers would have found bliss elsewhere, and left gaming until it got better again.
Yet now, all it takes is a single web post somewhere to set off an army of angry warriors, obsessed with justice and right. Feminists like this bimbo used to dominate only because people avoided the fight, but now there are so many people itching to fight that they are looking for fights in other people’s battles. This is a big change, and we are not all that resource-restricted yet. Wait until the economic system collapses. The rage will be epic, and rabbits will run.
The rabbits are noticing this rule change now, even though it is so minor, and it is tripping their conflict-avoidance circuitry. Scalzi, the pied rabbit piper, sees his blog traffic plummeting as his followers retreat into the shadows, even as Vox’s traffic breaks new records. Blue SF is beginning to realize the gains in its economic muscle as it advances on pink SF. In American politics, Democrats are trying to figure out what to stand for to avoid getting destroyed in the future. And legions of little tyrants like the bimbo in Vox’s post are noticing that their social attacks are generating very real counter-attacks, making them begin to retreat from their side as well.
Being rooted as it is in an outmoded theory of evolution, r/K theory may sound more than a little alien, if not lunatic. But it is a remarkably useful explanatory, and at times, even predictive model. I highly recommend AC’s book, so much so that we recently began selling it in the Castalia House store.
Read the whole linked post, as he explains why an abundance of resources favors the rabbits and creates a false impression of reality with them. They are fearless and eager to engage in the posturing and verbal interplay that for them, passes for conflict, failing to realize that the only reason they aren’t being ripped limb-from-limb and devoured is because it’s less trouble for the wolves to simply go somewhere else where they can live in peace.
#GamerGate erupted because there is nowhere else to go. The demon-rabbits have invaded the Last Redoubt; Anita Sarkeesian calls herself a “gamer” and the likes of Zoe Quinn and John Scalzi even fancy themselves “game developers” now. They simply won’t leave us alone, and so we have no choice but to fight back simply to be able to do what we have always done, which is to make the games we want to make and play the games we want to play. As AC noted, the same thing is true of science fiction. After being being offered book contracts that were subsequently pulled or violated on purely political grounds by three different publishers, it became apparent that I would be better off simply starting my own publishing company. Now Castalia House is growing as fast as we are able to edit the books and authors are contacting us specifically because they know we will publish things that the r-selected mainstream publishers will not. And even after a record year with over 15 million pageviews, site traffic here is up an average of 35 percent in 2015; thanks to you, we’re presently on target to exceed 21 million this year.
The transition from r to K is in the process of taking place on a much larger scale as well. The white flight of the last fifty years, first to the suburbs, then to the exurbs, is no longer possible. Everywhere from South Africa to Vancouver, formerly white communities are being invaded by rainbow hordes of orcs who would rather live among white people than among their own kind. Once the land resources are scarce and there is no longer a choice between retreat and conflict, then conflict will inevitably begin. Whites aren’t unable to engage in the sort of ethnic cleansing that Hispanics are already engaging in across the Southwestern United States (look at the demographic history of Compton sometime; it is borderline mind-blowing to anyone who associates it with NWA), but tend to be reluctant to engage in it because they are too efficient and lethal at it. These furious attempts to enforce diversity by thought police are actually a harbinger of the ongoing transition.
The rabbits can sense the wolves beginning to turn on them, and quite rightly, they are afraid. Don’t forget who they truly are and what they have done.
White Knights never learn. Well, they might learn just enough to stop sticking their genitals in the fire, but they never seem to grasp the basic principle that the end result of fire is to burn things into ashes:
I started advocating for women in engineering in 2006 when my dean at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, Kristina Johnson, made me aware of the declining numbers of women entering the field. As a former tech entrepreneur, I found the situation alarming. I had spent the last few years researching how education, immigration, and entrepreneurship drive innovation. The fact that half of our population was being left out of the fields most important to our future seemed deeply wrong to me….
Over the past few weeks, I have been accused of financial impropriety, arrogance and insensitivity, and sexual harassment. You expect these types of insults from bloggers, but I was quite surprised to find them coming from a National Public Radio affiliate, WNYC.
On February 6, WNYC published a podcast titled “Quiet, Wadhwa.” It criticized me for “taking the oxygen out of the room” by “speaking for women.” There were more than 11 minutes of inaccuracies and innuendo made against me without even an attempt at fact-checking — despite the serious nature of the charges. The vast majority of allegations would not have passed a simple Google search. Yet I was not even asked to comment. WNYC completely disregarded the fact that I routinely share my media platform with women and regularly refer journalists to women in tech….
I may have made the mistake of fighting the battles of women in technology for too long. And I may have taken the accusations too personally. Today there is a chorus of very powerful, intelligent, voices who are speaking from personal experience. The women who I have written about, who have lived the discrimination and abuse, as well as others, deserve the air time. So I am going to bow out of this debate.
I am still going to be an advocate for disenfranchised minorities; I will continue to mentor women and men entrepreneurs; I will surely coach my friends who are in positions of power in corporations; and I will echo the words of great women.
You would think that these jokers would learn that once they let the entryists into the room, their services are no longer required and they are expected to leave the newly surrendered ground to its new owners.
The Mountain That Writes turns around and comes back for a second pass:
This Book Bomb is a little different. Because the ones I’m doing right now are to get more people exposed to the works we nominated for the infamous Sad Puppies slate, we’re bombing a bunch of works at the same time. I don’t like putting this many links, but time is of the essence, and next week I’ll post about the Campbell nominees and Best Related Works.
We did three novellas last week and it was a huge success. They’re still selling well a week later. Overall we sold a couple thousands novellas, which in novellas is freaking huge.
But shorter fiction is tough, because it isn’t always available for sale by itself, but is usually bundled as part of an anthology, or in a magazine which often isn’t available on Amazon.
As you can see from the list below, luckily many of these are available on Amazon, and some are available for FREE:
BEST SHORT STORY
Both Rabid Puppies recommendations in the Short Story category can be read for free at the following links. I can attest that Sci Phi Journal #2 is quite good and I think the Big Book of Monsters looks particularly interesting.
I’ve also got a short story you can read which is not part of either slate, but I promised to make it available for free reading, so here it is:
BEST NOVELETTE
“The Journeyman: In the Stone House”by Michael F. Flynn, Analog, June 2014
“Championship B’tok” by Edward M. Lerner, Analog, Sept 2014
“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rinehart, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
And the Rabid Puppies recommendation in the Novelette category:
“Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” by John C. Wright, The Book of Feasts & Seasons
The Book of Feasts & Seasons is presently ranked #15,271 54,462 on Amazon and has a 4.9 rating on 18 16 reviews. It’s genuinely that good, so I’d highly recommend reading it if you haven’t yet, and posting a review if you have.