#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
As you may have noticed from the sidebar, Arkhaven is now running weekly episodes from three comic series, Chuck Dixon’s Avalon, Right Ho, Jeeves, and Alt★Hero. As today is Wednesday, Right Ho, Jeeves episode 2, Regrettable Events, is now live and readable on PC and mobile.
The ride never ends.
CDAN isn’t letting a certain corporation bury its unholy marketing:
This massive corporation that all of you know and the entire world knows was trying to promote its new mixed reality device. How they chose to do this was to hook up with the “most legendary performance artist working now.” In reality, she makes her money putting herself into as many Satanic images as she can and even had 666 in her social media profile for a long time.
The ad that emerged was people wearing the device to witness a ghostly version of the artist appearing out of nowhere while walking around while wearing a symbolic red dress. This was released on Good Friday, which was certainly unusual.
The video was not well received at all. After a flood of negative comments and about 90{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} thumbs down, the company set the video to private and also removed all traces of the campaign from its official website – although it still appears in Google search results.
In case you still had any doubts about the evil intentions of Bill Gates, that should pretty much do it.
Conventional classroom education is expensive, unhealthy, and unethical:
The recent coronavirus pandemic has forced students to take to virtual online classrooms to complete their coursework. Even though it may take time for students to adjust to this new format, their education might not suffer, especially if they are in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.
A new study led by Cornell University researchers shows that STEM students learn just as much in online classrooms as they do in traditional in-person classes. Online courses might be less satisfying than in-person classes, but many more students can access them and they are much cheaper to facilitate.
STEM students in Russia participated in this study in the 2017-18 academic year. Researchers divided 325 students into one of three classroom styles for two of their courses: a fully online class through a program called OpenEdu; an in-person course as their local university or a blended course with online course lectures; and in-person discussion sessions.
Results of the study show that students in all three groups scored pretty similarly on their final exams. Students in the online course scored 7.2{de336c7190f620554615b98f51c6a13b1cc922a472176e2638084251692035b3} higher on their regular coursework, but this is probably because they were allowed to make up to three attempts on their weekly assignments, allowing them to boost their scores.
The analyses show that there is one drawback to the online classroom style: students in the online group were less-satisfied with their class experience than students in the in-person or blended learning groups.
There really isn’t any reason to maintain the conventional school system anymore, except for the global elite’s interest in imposing its centralized propaganda.
A number of people have been asking for some form of Arkhaven subscription for over a year now, and as I’ve mentioned, I’ve been reluctant to commit to that for various reasons, most of them related to a lack of confidence about our ability to fulfil the necessary commitments involved. And I’m still not willing to commit to a new print comic from the same series being released every month, as there are too many moving parts involved in the process to be certain that we can do that, while the collapse of the retail market obviously further complicates things in that regard.
However, the recent developments concerning the ongoing crash of the mainstream comics industry and the discovery of the massive Webtoons market has caused us to modify our strategic thinking, especially due to the way that the latter is presently tied to a certain company with which Replatformers will be familiar. In light of this recalibration, we have decided to make available an Arkhaven subscription for The Legend Chuck Dixon, beginning with Chuck Dixon’s Avalon, which is the first of what we hope will be many of his Arkhaven comics available in episodic format on Webtoons.
There are currently four levels of support for the new comics subscription. Initially, the rewards are focused on utilizing existing content, some of which has never before been released from The Legend’s archives, but once we hit certain levels, the rewards will change to reflect our ability to provide new content, including brand new series from The Legend as well as more of his literary adaptations such as Right Ho, Jeeves, The Hobbit, and A Throne of Bones. The image on the upper left is a sketch for the cover of the first issue of the latter. The levels are stackable, so Collector’s Only will include the other three.
We haven’t set any formal goals yet, but we probably need to be around $3k monthly before we can reasonably commit to providing pure subscriber-driven content, which would result in a) weekly digital episodes, b) gold logo single issues for the subscribers, and c) retail omnibuses (with subscriber’s discount) of the new comic. In the meantime, we have begun the episodic offensive. Speaking of which, I’m pleased to be able to announce the first weekly episodes of both Right Ho, Jeeves and Alt★Hero. We intend to begin with three weekly series, expanding that to five as soon as the relevant artists are brought up to speed on the new format.
This is a critical moment in the war for the comics industry. And while we’re too small to be in a position to win that war yet, this is an excellent opportunity for us to gain ground in preparation for the next round. Even if you’re not interested in comics, or in a position to subscribe, I would encourage you to subscribe to the various weekly series at Webtoons, as that is a free and easy way to take part in this. I realize that this isn’t exactly what some of you have been asking for, but I believe this is a necessary first step towards that.
On a related note, an illustrator and fan of a certain French superhero sent this excellent portrayal of Dynamique contemplating the ongoing collapse of establishment comics. I think it is fair to say that it is a matter of absolutely no concern to her.
Corona-chan has hit the Devil Mouse hard:
Media industry analyst Hal Vogel estimated that Disney is losing roughly $30 million a day amid the coronavirus pandemic, The New York Times reported. Disney has closed its theme parks and cruise lines, and has postponed the releases of several films, including Black Widow and Mulan, leading to massive drops in revenue as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread.
Disney’s focus on “experiences” over “on-screen entertainment” was once both coveted and imitated, but is now completely impossible to execute amid a pandemic that forces everyone to socially distance.
Even Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, which is ideal for those staying inside, and reportedly racked up 50 million subscribers in 5 months is financially struggling due to the lack of new content, as all entertainment productions have come to a standstill.
The combination of these losses led Disney to borrow $6 billion last month, and they continue to lose “$30 million or more a day,” according to Vogel.
I really don’t see how Marvel stays alive in this scenario. They’re getting hit from both ends, by Disney and by Diamond, as the struggles of the former make it difficult to bail them out from the situation created by the non-payments of the latter. The challenges facing the establishment comics is why we are now redoubling our efforts to produce new content and why we are supporting The Legend in his latest endeavor.
One thing I noticed in all the pictures of the victims of the coronavirus was that those who were not very old tended to be very overweight. Apparently this may not have been just the coincidental result of a pro-body positivity bias on the part of the editors selecting the photos.
For months, scientists have been poring over data about cases and deaths to understand why it is that COVID-19 manifests itself in different ways around the world, with certain factors such as the age of the population repeatedly popping up as among the most significant determinants.
Now, one of the largest studies conducted of COVID-19 infection in the United States has found that obesity of patients was the single biggest factor in whether those with COVID-19 had to be admitted to a hospital.
“The chronic condition with the strongest association with critical illness was obesity, with a substantially higher odds ratio than any cardiovascular or pulmonary disease,” write lead author Christopher M. Petrilli of the NYU Grossman School and colleagues in a paper, “Factors associated with hospitalization and critical illness among 4,103 patients with Covid-19 disease in New York City.”
Remember, the first element of scientody is observation.
There is literally nothing that is safe from SJWs. Not even being part of a foreign industry conducted in a foreign language that they don’t understand is enough to protect one from their rapacious and never-ending demands to submit to their narrative:
Fans of Japanese animation are getting increasingly angry at the politically correct reworking of the cartoons when they’re translated into English.
A recent announcement about anime production has alarmed consumers worried about the intrusion of political correctness into their entertainment. Funimation, a company that translates and distributes anime in English and which has a long record of censoring the English-language versions of the original Japanese shows, has joined a key committee overseeing anime production….
‘The Rising of the Shield Hero’ was deemed controversial in the USA because it included a storyline about a false accusation of rape. In the politically correct era of the Me Too movement, the suggestion that a woman might make a false accusation was considered provocative. The listen-and-believe agenda was deemed to apply to fiction. If Western partners – so politicised and vulnerable to social media pressure – were involved in assessing storylines, would such a plot be approved?
Western companies, staffed by individuals with assertive political and social outlooks, will attempt to influence Japanese studios, imposing their own beliefs. When progressives have the ability to meddle in the creative process they will not hold back, even if it leads to disastrous financial consequences. We already have evidence of this in the collapse of American superhero comics.
If you are not a fan of anime or manga, why should you care? Evidence shows that incremental expansion of control within culture affects us all. Political correctness in pop culture has already distorted production and reception of card games, video games, comics, movies and other areas. In high culture, moralising authoritarians exert powerful domination over fiction publication, theatre, ballet and museums, even leaving aside academia. Suppression of creativity and diversity of thought will continue and expand unless we actively expose and oppose it.
This is why we fight back every single time, in every single industry, no matter how seemingly insignificant. And as will be announced later today, we’re taking the opportunity of the SJW-inspired collapse in establishment superhero comics mentioned in the article to take back the ground that has been conceded to them.
Sometimes people ask me why I bother with comics when it obviously is not an area of particular interest to me. And it’s not, to be sure, as I have previously pointed out on the Darkstream, unless you read Eco and Dante in the original Italian, Goethe and Nietzsche in the original German, and Balzac in the original French, and your favorite authors are Eco, Hesse, and Murakami, you can’t possibly even hope to aspire to my level of literary snobdom. You need not remind me of the comic genre’s dearth of intellectual value; the fact that Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is considered the creme de la creme of comics should be a major point of embarrassment rather than pride.
But if you consider the level of influence Hollywood has had over Western culture for the last sixty years, then simply consider the list of movies that performed best at the box office, it is patently obvious that comics is one battleground that must not be conceded to the enemies of Western civilization.
The New York Times hasn’t decided whether Creepy Joe Biden should be canceled or not. What’s the matter, can’t they get George Soros on the phone in New Zealand or wherever he is hiding out?
A former Senate aide who last year accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of inappropriate touching has made an allegation of sexual assault against the former vice president, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee this fall.
The former aide, Tara Reade, who briefly worked as a staff assistant in Mr. Biden’s Senate office, told The New York Times that in 1993, Mr. Biden pinned her to a wall in a Senate building, reached under her clothing and penetrated her with his fingers. A friend said that Ms. Reade told her the details of the allegation at the time. Another friend and a brother of Ms. Reade’s said she told them over the years about a traumatic sexual incident involving Mr. Biden.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Biden said the allegation was false. In interviews, several people who worked in the Senate office with Ms. Reade said they did not recall any talk of such an incident or similar behavior by Mr. Biden toward her or any women. Two office interns who worked directly with Ms. Reade said they were unaware of the allegation or any treatment that troubled her.
Last year, Ms. Reade and seven other women came forward to accuse Mr. Biden of kissing, hugging or touching them in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Ms. Reade told The Times then that Mr. Biden had publicly stroked her neck, wrapped his fingers in her hair and touched her in ways that made her uncomfortable.
Soon after Ms. Reade made the new allegation, in a podcast interview released on March 25, The Times began reporting on her account and seeking corroboration through interviews, documents and other sources. The Times interviewed Ms. Reade on multiple days over hours, as well as those she told about Mr. Biden’s behavior and other friends. The Times has also interviewed lawyers who spoke to Ms. Reade about her allegation; nearly two dozen people who worked with Mr. Biden during the early 1990s, including many who worked with Ms. Reade; and the other seven women who criticized Mr. Biden last year, to discuss their experiences with him.
No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade’s allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.
Translation: Because it is still possible that Creepy Joe might be the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, the New York Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct beyond the sexual misconduct that it couldn’t hope to plausibly deny.
One of the things we’ve learned over the last 18 months is how different artists work in very different ways. This tends to pose a range of complications, some trivial, some more challenging, in attempting to assemble the various elements into a complete whole in different formats.
One obvious candidate for Webtoons was Right Ho, Jeeves, but our initial assumption was that it would not be possible to break apart the page files in a manner that permitted reassembly in the vertical format popularized by the Korean manwha comics. However, a little experimentation proved to be unexpectedly fruitful, and has permitted the launch of Arkhaven’s second series there.
So, if you’re interested, have a look at the first episode of Right Ho, Jeeves. We expect to have three weekly series running there on an ongoing basis.
After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.
The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”
So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
– Matthew 28: 1-10
He is risen. Have a Happy Easter.