Category: Uncategorized

Mailvox: a convention, converged

The lesson, as always, is this: don’t ever take McRapey’s advice:

Arisia is a mid-sized sf and fantasy convention in Boston which has been taken over by SJW’s despite some of us attempting to resist them. This year’s GOH was John Scalzi who triggered several changes to the code of conduct.

However, the con chair wasn’t satisfied was that. She insisted that every attendee sign a printed copy of the COC, even though it required 5 point type to fit on a single page. The con cobbled together new registration software and procedures to fulfill this requirement, but there were many problems with it. The registration line reached nearly 3 hours though its peak last year had been about 20 minutes.

Furthermore, faced with this fiasco, the con chair still was unwilling to back off the requirement to expedite registration.

Prediction: attendance at the conventions that have adopted Codes of Conduct that affect the experience in any way will gradually fall off. I know that in the Django project, the amount of emails and posts have already fallen off considerably, because everyone is, quite rightly, afraid that saying anything will make them a target of SJW attack.

This is why you don’t permit their entryists in the first place, and why you certainly don’t give into their demands. Convergence always eventually kills the converged organization unless it can latch onto a host that will financially sustain it.

No Code of Conduct

Paul M Jones provides another good way to address SJW entryst attacks:

What is NCoC

No Code Of Conduct is a groundbreaking new idea. Designed to help you find communities and projects that will not get stuck endlessly debating how members should behave in their communities, only to be found to never be fully resolved to anyone’s liking. What if… we all agreed?

    We are all adults. Capable of having adult discussions.

    We accept everyone’s contributions, we don’t care if you’re liberal or conservative, black or white, straight or gay, or anything in between! In fact, we won’t bring it up, or ask. We simply do not care.

    Nothing else matters!

Q: Great! How do I add this to my project?

Simply copy CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md into the root directory of your project. You may modify it to your needs.

Q: How do I promote No Code of Conduct?

Feel free to talk about, discuss, and promote No Code of Conduct anywhere you wish, and use the hashtag #NCoC on Twitter.

Q: What if, this makes me feel discriminated against?

If you feel this way simply because we do not have a code of conduct, it is hard for anyone to relate to you. This is not intended to discriminate against anyone. Simply because we don’t babysit people on our site to make sure they treat you with respect, does not mean we hope you feel unwelcome, or that you are treated without respect. That is just not something we have time for.

I still favor the One-Finger Code of Conduct myself, but there is certainly a place for the No Code of Conduct as well as the Code of Merit.

SJWs in tech

“Women in Tech” is not only code for “SJWs in Tech”, but it is a massive waste of resources and it is extremely harmful to the women who are coerced and encouraged to waste their lives doing something for which they have neither the interest nor the commitment:

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
No individual with a useful skill set capable of delivering needs to be babied or coerced into working.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
You do women a terrible disservice by trying to convince those who are not seriously interested in the field to enter it.

Jennifer Medina ‏@JenniferJMedina
You do everyone a terrible disservice by discouraging every human being from being introduced to more of what life has to offer.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
You’re wrong. I save those people years of their lives and thousands of dollars by showing them what it ACTUALLY involves.

Jennifer Medina ‏@JenniferJMedina
I don’t give a flying fuck about your anecdotal evidence. Your personal views and life are not on the table of discussion here.

Wrongfan ‏@Badthincks
I am a STEM woman (mathematics) and he is right.  In fact I spent years trying to push girls into STEM.

Wrongfan ‏@Badthincks
It’s a waste of time to try and push ANYONE into something they have no genuine inclination for.

Considering how there are already far too many PhDs for the number of positions available, and that there are already 1,000 people applying for 12 game development positions, it should be obvious that encouraging uninterested women to go into a field where they are almost guaranteed to go unemployed is reprehensible.

Stats provided by Creative Skillset show that in 2014, 60 universities and colleges offered 215 undergraduate and 40 master video game courses. The most recent stats available, courtesy of the Higher Education Statistics Agency for the 2012/2013 academic year, show that 3,125 students were taking games as a subject of study.

Compare this with the 620 studios in the UK, according to TIGA, and you can see the difficulties studios face when lending experience in such a highly competitive field. Lenton says a local studio in  Leamington Spa, which houses around up to 300 staff, recently had over 1,000 applications for a dozen places.

What are the chances that a girl who required hand-holding and cheerleading just to get her to pay any attention to the industry in the first place is going to be talented and driven enough to beat out the 98.8 percent of highly competitive young men and women who want nothing more than to make games?

That’s not career advice. That’s a fantasy novel.

National Review risks non-profit status

Justin Raimondo observes that Rich Lowry appears to have committed a serious legal blunder, as well as the obvious political one, with the “Stop Trump” issue:

The publication of a special “Stop Trump” issue of National Review was heralded in a blaze of publicity. Editor Rich Lowry appeared on Fox News and was interviewed by Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly, where he proceeded to denounce The Donald as a threat to the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement….

All well and good: there are plenty of reasons for principled conservatives (and libertarians) to oppose Trump. However, there’s one big problem with this well-publicized blast at The Donald.

In March of last year, Politico reported that National Review was becoming a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, which would enable it to solicit tax-deductible donations: “Since its launch, the magazine has operated as a not-for-profit business, even as it came to rely on more and more donations in recent years. Starting next month, it will become a nonprofit organization, which will make it exempt from federal taxes. National Review also plans to merge with the nonprofit National Review Institute, its sister organization, according to a source with knowledge of the plans.”

Rich Lowry averred that the shift would be good for the magazine, which was fighting a costly lawsuit and had never been profitable anyway. “We’re a mission and a cause, not a profit-making business,” he told Politico. “The advantage of the move is that all the generous people who give us their support every year will now be able to give tax-deductible contributions, and that we will be able to do more fundraising, in keeping with our goal to keep growing in the years ahead.’”

This anti-Trump issue of National Review is, in effect, a campaign pamphlet directed against a political candidate—indeed, the cover proclaims “Against Trump”—and, as such, is in clear violation of IRS statutes regulating nonprofit organizations.

The regulations are quite explicit that nonprofit organizations must “not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

I’m sorry, I have no cogent analysis to offer; I’m not even sure what the article said. I found it hard to pay attention after cracking up when I got to the part about “the intellectual integrity of the conservative movement.”

That’s a good one!

Pity the poor orcs

The Head of the White Council writes an important letter to the Minas Tirith Times:

One of the major challenges that we face today, on a global scale, is how to protect people who have been forced, by armed conflict, human right abuse or other forms of persecution to flee their homelands.

  Overwhelmingly, refugees do not willingly leave their homes and families.   They do not come to Gondor seeking financial advancement.   Most do not even leave with a final destination in mind.

   They leave because of the fear of what will happen to them if they don’t.

  They leave because of the persecution and abuse that they have faced on a daily basis.

  As a country, Gondor shares responsibility with the rest of the international community, for protecting these refugees by offering them a place where they can be safe. 

Read the rest of it there.

National Review against America

A helpful list of all the National Review contributors who are against both Donald Trump and the American national interest.

National Review is so desperate to prop up its fading anti-nationalist conservatism that it has turned its entire magazine into an anti-Trump hit piece.

For months, Republican leaders have worried about how to stop 2016 frontrunner Donald Trump. Now, one of the conservative movement’s most influential publications is taking matters into its own hands.

National Review is dedicating a special issue of its magazine, one week before the Iowa caucuses, to stopping Trump. “Against Trump,” blares the magazine cover. Inside, a blistering editorial questions Trump’s commitment to conservatism, warning voters that backing him is tantamount to allowing the conservative movement to have “fallen in behind a huckster.”

“Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones,” the editorial reads.

And that’s just the start.

The National Review issue features anti-Trump essays from more than 20 conservative thinkers, leaders and commentators spanning the GOP’s ideological spectrum from David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian-infused Cato Institute, to William Kristol, the hawkish editor of the Weekly Standard, to David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth. All call for Republicans to nominate someone other than Trump.

Or to put it another way:

SF-SJWs double down

Allum Bokhari of Breitbart addresses the latest attempts by SJWs in science fiction to silence all dissent:

There is no doubt that some sci-fi authors hold views that are alien to much of mainstream, liberal opinion. However, the SJWs who are trying to drive them out continue to fail to grasp that no political opinion is justification for exclusion from awards participation, bookstores, or the sci-fi community at large. The point of sci-fi is good sci-fi, and the point of awards is to recognise good sci-fi, not politically conformist opinions.

SJWs continue to demonstrate their inability – or unwillingness – to separate good art from questionable artists. In a manner eerily similar to the anti-historical campaigns to scrub images of unfashionable – yet historically significant – individuals like Woodrow Wilson and Cecil Rhodes from university campuses and public spaces. At the behest of SJWs,  the face of H.P Lovecraft, one of the genre’s pioneers, was recently removed from the iconic trophies of the World Fantasy Awards.

There’s something ISIS-like to it: the purging of historical icons and works of art because they represent something that falls outside a rigid, intolerant ideology.

Political intolerance in sci-fi appears to be growing, not diminishing. The Sad Puppies of 2016 will have their work cut out for them.

The mere fact that they are having to do openly what they managed to do behind closed doors for 30 years is a victory. And from Castalia House to Brave, we’re seeing one example after another of those who love freedom fighting back.

We’re going to win, in the end, because they are nothing but parasites and cargo cultists. They can’t create, they can’t build, all they can do is latch onto something someone else has created and converge it. Now, as the recent actions by the Linux Foundation have demonstrated, people are realizing that if they do not keep out the entryists, if they do not expel the SJWs, their organizations will not survive.

No SJWs allowed

One senses the hand of Linus Torvalds behind this unexpected action by the Linux Foundation:

Linux Foundation quietly drops community representation

The Linux Foundation is an industry organisation dedicated to “promoting, protecting and standardising Linux and open source software”[1]. The majority of its board is chosen by the member companies – 10 by platinum members (platinum membership costs $500,000 a year), 3 by gold members (gold membership costs $100,000 a year) and 1 by silver members (silver membership costs between $5,000 and $20,000 a year, depending on company size). Up until recently individual members ($99 a year) could also elect two board members, allowing for community perspectives to be represented at the board level.

As of last Friday, this is no longer true. The by-laws were amended to drop the clause that permitted individual members to elect any directors. Section 3.3(a) now says that no affiliate members may be involved in the election of directors, and section 5.3(d) still permits at-large directors but does not require them[2]. The old version of the bylaws are here – the only non-whitespace differences are in sections 3.3(a) and 5.3(d).

These changes all happened shortly after Karen Sandler announced that she planned to stand for the Linux Foundation board during a presentation last September. A short time later, the “Individual membership” program was quietly renamed to the “Individual supporter” program and the promised benefit of being allowed to stand for and participate in board elections was dropped (compare the old page to the new one). Karen is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organisation involved in the vitally important work of GPL enforcement. The Linux Foundation has historically been less than enthusiastic about GPL enforcement, and the SFC is funding a lawsuit against one of the Foundation’s members for violating the terms of the GPL. The timing may be coincidental, but it certainly looks like the Linux Foundation was willing to throw out any semblance of community representation just to ensure that there was no risk of someone in favour of GPL enforcement ending up on their board.

The Foundation’s action doesn’t have anything to do with Karen Sandler being the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, but rather, her having been the executive director of the Gnome Foundation, which she bankrupted in three years by devoting nearly 50 percent of the foundation’s budget to a new Women’s Outreach Program.

This demonstrates the seriousness of the threat that the most influential  people in tech know that the SJWs pose to it. It is well worth destroying the community aspect of a project to keep them out, if necessary, because if they are allowed in, they will spend all their time and effort in attempting to take it over; even if they are prevented from doing so, far too many resources will be wasted in stopping them, resources that could have been spent on achieving the goals of the project.

Keep them out. As Linus knows, even it requires changing the rules, you have to keep them out.

Art internship

As part of the first Dev Game course, we’re doing four very small games that are updated remakes of Apple II classics. While we have sufficient programmer volunteers, we’re short an artist.

So, if you’re an animator/illustrator and you’re interested in a short, modestly paid internship in the game industry, send me an email with examples of your work. And by work, I mean animated illustrations.