Category: Uncategorized

Mailvox: converging Total War

AR observes some unnecessary updates to one of the dogs of the Total War series.

I decided to try replaying Total War: Rome 2 recently. After a mandatory update from Steam, I noticed a bunch of… peculiar updates. Nothing has changed except the following:

  • They added female Generals / Leaders. This includes voices and skins (graphics) for female characters both on the strategic map and the battlefield.
  • They added feminist propaganda in the loading screens. This goes for graphics and copy.

Zenobia is perhaps the only female whose superior genius broke through the servile indolence imposed on her sex by the climate and manners of Asia.
– Edward Gibbon, English historian (1734-1794)

Why would they put all this work into a 5-year-old video game that flopped upon release? Do you think a blue-haired androgyne fatty take over that project?

It sounds to me as if an SJW was named a first-time producer on a minor project and decided that the game could be updated by bringing its politics up to date.

Alt-Hero #1 available in print again

Just to note that the print edition of AH#1 Crackdown is available again at Castalia Books Direct, Amazon, and your local bookseller. We did NOT end up changing the margins since we determined that would have made matters worse, so we only made a minor change to properly center the image on the back cover. You’ll see how we’re addressing the problem of trim variation on the margins in AH#2, as we’re going to a full-bleed slash pseudo full-bleed approach that effectively eliminates it.

Amazon is sold out, so it will take a few days for them to restock. The fastest way to buy it is from Castalia Books Direct.

Startup = sellout

Megan Fox covers the Stripe 180 on PJ Media:

Every time reports of conservatives being silenced on social media platforms come out, a large percentage of libertarians shout, “but private companies can serve whoever they want! Build your own platforms.” It is a constant criticism of anyone saying that social media and Silicon Valley need regulation or that political viewpoints need protection under the law. But when marginalized voices create their own platforms, the puppet masters of Silicon Valley who control all the infrastructure shut them down.

Vox Day, a contributor at BitChute and popular author of SJWs Always Double Down, told PJM, “The denial of payment services on ideological grounds is a significant blow to the libertarian idea that private companies can be permitted to operate without government oversight.” Day has significant experience being deplatformed on the major social media sites….

Stripe claimed in their notice of cancellation to Bitchute founder Ray Vahey that it was their “financial partners” who objected to Bitchute’s business model. “We are politically neutral, and have many creators from across the political spectrum,” Vahey told PJM. “Our site is still operational in terms of video streaming, but we have not been able to accept money since the Stripe termination,” he explained. “They gave us only 5 days notice, even though our account was in good standing and we had not broken any of their rules or laws or even had any customer complaints.”

The notice he received from Stripe was strange, filled with rambling excuses for termination with no specifics. Stripe employee “Gus” wrote:

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to overturn our decision regarding your account. Our financial partners have some fairly strict limitations on the type of businesses we can work with, and sadly your business type falls into a category which our financial partners consider to be high-risk. I’m truly sorry about that… this is a restriction imposed upon us directly from our financial partners, who use have [sic] an archaic and frankly antiquated view of non-traditional businesses.

Stripe refuses to say who the “financial partners” are. PJM also reached out to Stripe but received no response.

This tends to indicate the situation is as I suspected. Stripe is looking to cash in, so they are doing whatever their investors and prospective buyers want them to do. Which, in this case, is shutting down the services that allow people to bypass both the ideological gatekeepers as well as the financial gatekeepers.

It’s not an accident that they are attempting to shut down the crowdfunding sites, beginning with the alternative ones. That’s primarily what this is about. Rest assured, they have their sights on Kickstarter and Indie-Go-Go too.

The eurocrumble continues

The Sweden Democrats want out:

The leader of the far-right anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats is calling for a referendum on EU membership, hoping for a ‘Swexit’ result. Jimmie Åkesson, 39, branded the EU ‘a large web of corruption’, and said Sweden should hold a referendum after the general elections this September. ‘We pay an enormous amount of money and get overwhelmingly little back. But the main reason is ideological: we should not be in an ideological union.’

The Sweden Democrats is currently the second biggest party in the Scandinavian nation, boosted by the European migrant crisis which saw Sweden take in more refugees per capita than any other EU country. 

Meanwhile, Matteo Salvini remains staunchly opposed to the invasion by sea:

Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Salvini on Saturday warned another migrant rescue mission off the Libyan coast that it would not be allowed to land its “human cargo” at an Italian port.

The new rightwing and anti-immigrant Italian government last week banned the French NGO operated vessel the Aquarius, with more than 600 rescued migrants on board, from docking in Italy, causing uproar and a sharp spat with France.
 
Spain subsequently offered to take the Aquarius and it is expected at the port of Valencia on Sunday.

Salvini showed no sign Saturday of softening his position.
 
“While the Aquarius is sailing towards Spain, two other Dutch NGO operated vessels (Lifeline and Seefuchs) have arrived off the Libyan coast, to wait for their human cargos once the people smugglers abandon them,” Salvini said in a Facebook post.
 
“These people should know that Italy no longer wants to be any part of this business of clandestine immigration and they will have to look for other ports to go to,” he said.
 
“As minister and as a father, I take this action for the benefit of all,” he added.
 
After Rome’s decision to ban the Aquarius, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte met on Friday and agreed that the EU should set up asylum processing centres in Africa to prevent “voyages of death.”

Cucks complain about media SJWs

Specifically, they complain about the media SJWs treating them and the moderate leftists they admire the way that they treat everyone to their Right.

Jordan Peterson has become so effective a messenger—and not just in Canada—that it was inevitable that the MSM, the left, and academics (but I repeat myself) would put forth effort to discredit and discount him. So if you’ve been paying attention you’ll have noticed a recent spate of articles and statements saying just where he went so grievously wrong, how he draws his support from bigots and alt-righters (and/or is one himself), and fails to understand this or that or the other thing on which the critic/writer is an expert. Here’s a recent example of the latter (hat tip commenter Artfldgr), and there are plenty more of the former as well such as this one from NBC.

Watch that last video; it’s less than two minutes long, and it’s instructive—not about Peterson, but about the way the MSM approaches the topic of “explaining” him. Most of these hit pieces are relatively subtle, as is this one (“Who is Jordan Peterson, favorite figure of the alt-right”), which hardly talks about what Peterson actually says, gets some of that wrong when it does (beginning with saying he refuses to be pigeonholed and then offering as an example of that him speaking about an entirely different subject, his refusal to automatically use left-dictated pronouns for transgendered people), but quickly delivers its main message of “bigots love him, therefore he’s tainted.”

The goal is quite clearly to make him persona non grata to people who’ve never watched a video of his or read anything he’s written, making him so toxic that they will pigeonhole him (“alt-right bigot”) and never indulge whatever curiosity they might have by going to the source, Peterson. These pieces are not meant to actually inform; they’re meant to block any desire the listener might have to inform him/herself. After all, life is short, we have a finite amount of time here, and why waste it listening to a bigot or a figure beloved by bigots?

It’s particularly funny to see how the readers of this “neo-neocon” promptly make use of the very same tactics to try to make me persona non grata when someone points out that I have shown Jordan Peterson to be an evil left-wing globalist charlatan.

Johnny Ray:
Vox Day a true altrighty debunks JP on his blog as a fraud

om:
Oh noes, not Vox Day! As if Jordon Peterson has ever claimed to be of the alt-right. The left says it over and over, but saying a thing doesn’t make it so.

vanderleun:
Vox Day’s extreme jealousy of Peterson is transparent, vile and disgusting. He shows his true colors as an envious mental midget who is in love with only his own vapors. Basically, like the rotted pulp stuff he cranks out, he’s a comic book.

First, the point isn’t that Jordan Peterson isn’t of the alt-right. He’s not. The point is that he’s not of the Right at all, his philosophy is evil, his logic is incoherent, and his advice is bad. As for the constant accusations of envy, I am no more jealous of the haunted, suicidal, godless, mentally unbalanced Peterson than I was of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, PZ Myers, or that little doughball Scalzi. Those who believe all criticism is rooted in jealousy always reveal more than they realize about themselves.

penngineer
I was lucky enough to see JBP in Nashville at the Ryman last week, and luckier still to meet him (I couldn’t afford a VIP ticket, but waiting outside the theater for a long time afterwards paid off!). He really IS everything that you would hope and expect him to be. His gaze is so intense when he makes eye contact with you, and you can really see the genuine warmth and compassion in his eyes. Truly a great man.

These idiots genuinely deserve everything they are going to eventually experience. Sweet St. Darwin, but they are dumber than the dodos were. Because greatness truly depends upon the perception of compassion in one’s eyes.

Facebook stalking

If this freelance reporter working with Rolling Stone and NPR stalks you on social media, just ignore her request for other people’s contact information, let us know that she contacted you and tell us on what form of social media you were contacted. We want to know exactly how many people are being stalked and where they are being stalked.

Remember, no means no!

Twitter suspends Spacebunny

Or rather, “suspends her account”. Of course, “suspension” is Twitter-speak for banning.

Hello Spacebunny Day,

Your account, Spacebunnyday has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules.

Specifically, for:

Violating our rules against abusive behavior.
You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.

Note that if you attempt to evade a permanent suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts.

Her thoughtcrime was to tell a very stupid woman who had been harassing her that she was stupid. Strange, I don’t remember anyone ever being permanently suspended for telling me that.

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #2

Arkhaven Comics is very pleased to be able to announce that QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #2: Zero Zero Tango is now available for Kindle and Kindle Select.

Chief Warrant Officer Graven Tower is a ruggedly handsome military policeman who hates aliens. Fortunately, as a member of His Grace’s Military Crimes Investigation Division – Xenocriminology and Alien Relations, he gets to arrest a lot of them. Sometimes he even gets to shoot them.

Chief Tower and Detector Derin Hildreth of the Trans Paradis Police Department are investigating the murder of the Crown Prince of Morchard on the shadowed streets of Trans Paradis City, but the alien government-in-exile is less than entirely helpful. The royal house of Morchard appears to be considerably more interested in seeking revenge than seeing justice done. But there is no way that Tower or MCID are going to let any vengeful xenos start another war in their house!

QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #2: Zero Zero Tango is 27 pages, retails for $2.99, and is available via Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. Matvei Daniilovich is still the illustrator, but starting with this issue, we arranged to get him a professional colorist in order to move from a bi-monthly release schedule to what we hope will be a monthly one, so you may note that the colors are a bit more vibrant in this issue. UPDATE: Look Inside is now enabled, so you can see these for yourself.

From the reviews of Quantum Mortis A Man Disrupted #1: By the Book:

  • The plot is interesting, and the universe feels like it has actual history and depth. Instead of skipping over the richness of the original novel the comic gives you a lot to read rather than just pretty pictures which you quickly turn past to find out what happens next.
  • It’s just the first issue, but the story is fantastic so far. I haven’t read the book on which it is based, so it’s totally new to me. I really love the look and slightly Blade Runner aesthetic and noir feel.
  • The story was good and got me interested in the characters. Dialog was snappy and smart. Hard to say what tech levels would be on a distant planet in the 3000s, after some big wars, but the tech-setting feels about right for a sci-fi crime-noir story.
  • Old school comic book. Cute girl, manly hero, robot comedy relief, dark conspiracy, gritty high tech future.
  • A fun start to an intriguing story, excellent retro artwork (I suspect that at some point in this storyline, a rocket-ship will land upright on a plume of flame, as God and Robert Heinlein intended), good banter, and the shadow of a prince’s corpse burnt into the ground as foreshadowing of things to come. This is going to be a fun series, count me in for more!
A print edition of issue #2 will be available in a few weeks in a gold logo edition.

UPDATE: Off to a good start:

#1 in Kindle Store > Comics & Graphic Novels > Military
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle Short Reads > 45 minutes (22-32 pages) > Comics & Graphic Novels
#3 in Kindle Store > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

ARKHAVEN UPDATE: the gold logo print edition of ALT-HERO #1 CRACKDOWN is now available again from the Castalia Books Direct store. Backorders should be shipping tomorrow. It should be live on Amazon again by the end of the week.

EVS reviews Alt-Hero #1

Ethan Van Sciver live-reviewed Alt-Hero #1: Crackdown, on his ComicArtistPro Secrets YouTube channel with his father on Father’s Day. He gave it a C+, unsurprisingly preferring the story to the artwork. Also, you should probably note that the actual review doesn’t begin until about the 38th minute.

If the reaction of most of his viewers is any guide, it will take a little while to win them over. They seem to think that blindly mimicking the way things are done in a rapidly collapsing industry, only excising the social justice, is the path to success. But that’s fine. We have gotten further, and we are making headway faster, than I ever imagined possible when we launched the initial campaign.

Anyhow, I very much appreciate EVS keeping his word and bringing this to the attention of his subscribers. I suspect AH #2 is going to be a big surprise to him and a lot of people.

Darkstream: Stripe and Operation Chokepoint

From the transcript of the Darkstream.

There’s a lot of folks, especially on the Right, who would have a tendency to say, “well you know, what’s the problem with that? I mean everybody has a right to sell to whoever they want to etc etc etc.” Right, and that’s true if you’re looking at it from a theoretical point of view, but the reality is we don’t live in a free economy, we don’t live in a society where you are simply allowed to go and set up a bank with 200 dollars and begin payment processing and issuing credit and all that sort of thing anymore.

I don’t think it was even a hundred years ago – somebody mentioned this on the blog – barely a hundred years ago it was possible to set up a bank for 200 bucks, start making loans, and that was how Regions Bank was founded originally. But you can’t do that now because the banks – just like the hairdressers and just like every other self-interested group of people – have arranged to set up tremendous regulatory barriers, huge barriers to entry. For example, in, I believe it was Georgia, you needed to have 1,500 hours of training in order to be allowed to braid hair professionally!

Now this is ridiculous, as anyone who has been around junior high school girls for more than about 20 minutes will know. They sit around braiding each other’s hair all the time, they don’t need to spend fifteen hundred hours to be able to do it, and so what we are seeing is a private version of what was described as Operation Chokepoint by the Obama administration. Operation Chokepoint was a plan to deny banking and financial services to companies that were selling guns. If you’re in the gun industry in any way, they were planning to target those companies, and in fact they are actually still doing so, but again on a private level because Hillary Clinton is not President, and so that’s why you’re seeing companies like Intuit, which owns Quicken, Intuit targeted I believe it was a gun retailer and possibly some gun manufacturers as well, and they’re simply not working with them now.

You know, this is absolutely ridiculous considering that we have been indoctrinated for the past however many years, it’s been 58 years or so, that you have no right to deny service to anyone for any reason. Suddenly now that the Left has completed its long march through the institutions, suddenly they are going to deny all that, they’re going to attempt to deny the financial oxygen to all the  companies and all the people they don’t like now. I’m not shocked by this. I’m not alarmed by this, you know, I’m a Christian and  we’ve been we’ve been told about the Mark of the Beast and and being
denied the ability to buy things, that that sort of persecution would happen since I was a kid at Sunday school. Now I have to admit I didn’t expect to see it taking this kind of form, but it is.