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Mailvox: a brief review of ASOS

AD writes the first review of the complete A SEA OF SKULLS.

I’ve finished A Sea of Skulls. Bought it, set out to read a chapter a night…which became two, and then three, and by the time I reached about the 1/3 point, I put the whole world on hold and finished it in two days.

As usual, your writing skill and style are impeccable–entertaining and engaging. For every plot thread closed you’ve managed to dangle three more…though, I think the next book will have to crack the planet and drain an ocean to top this ending.

Thoroughly enjoyable. I appreciated how the races have their own issues that so perfectly mirror modern ones, and enjoyed working out the foreign words from context. And I remain impressed by your skills–you managed to take a thoroughly repulsive Orc, turn him into a viewpoint character, and make him understandable, if not necessarily empathetic. I was convinced he was going to join Skuli any minute when he was ordered to throw himself onto the shield wall.

And, speaking of Skuli, his last quest was excellent. Here’s to the next book–unless, of course, you retire to the tropics and dump the whole thing into the lap of Brandon Sanderson.

I think Brandon Sanderson is too busy counting his crowdfunding money these days to be available to finish off anyone else’s epic fantasy series. So, I’ll just have to finish it myself.

UPDATE: The Didact graciously named A SEA OF SKULLS one of his best books of 2023:

Has he stuck the landing with the full version of Book 2?

Mostly, yes, he has.

ASOS has a few flaws to it, most of which relate to the difficulties in keeping the various plot-lines straight. You may have to go back and read the first book again to understand all the machinations behind the Amorran side of things – it has, after all, been eleven years since the first book saw the light of day, and quite a lot has happened since then.

The biggest flaw with the book has to be the ending, which definitely feels rushed and more than a little forced. I get the distinct impression that OBADSDL(PBUH) found himself getting lost in the details and realised this giant door-stopper of a book was getting really crazy – the full book will probably clock in at around 914 (!!!!!) pages, and that is a monumental text by any measure.

None of this changes a fundamental fact:

This is one of the best high fantasy books ever written.

High praise indeed. And while I never object to any reader’s impressions – they are simply what they are – in the interests of accuracy I will point out that the endings were neither rushed nor forced from my perspective, as they were always bound to take the various shapes they did by virtue of the character perspective limits. Remember, I’m not George Martin, and while I don’t do outlines, I do strictly limit how many characters get their own perspective and how many sections they get apiece. So, I always know roughly how much space I have with which to work in order to get to the close I have in mind.

You may notice that the word and page counts are almost identical to ATOB. That’s not an accident. And AGOG will be the same.

This isn’t to say one can’t reasonably criticize the particular sections of the story on which I choose to concentrate the detail. Perhaps it would be better if the middles were shorter and the ends longer. My choices are almost certainly suboptimal in some senses, and some characters get less “camera time” while others get more than various readers would prefer.

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Traffic Report 2023

At last, this blog appears to be, like its author, clearly past its peak. As I mentioned last year, the torch has been effectively passed to the community as a whole, and to other platforms and media. It’s neither frustrating nor to be lamented that the ideas can be transmitted so efficiently now that they reach people who have absolutely no direct contact with VP, the Darkstream, or any other traditional communications vehicle. See: Sigma Male. To the contrary, the current situation is to be viewed as an accomplishment and as a relief.

This is not an elegy or a farewell note for Vox Popoli. It’s simply a clear-eyed observation of how things have been playing out of late. Whether we like it or not, everything has a lifespan, time is limited, and it therefore behooves us to be realistic and practical about where things are, so that we can focus our efforts and energy appropriately. That’s why I track these numbers and write these summaries.

In 2023, Vox Popoli had 10,593,334 WordPress pageviews, down 11.9 percent from last year. The blog is now running at an average rate of 29,023 daily pageviews, down 10.1 percent from an average 32,926 last year. Total historic blog views closed out the year at 275,166,140. The running annual pageview totals are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757

2009: 4,414,801

2010: 4,827,183

2011: 5,422,628

2012: 6,098,774

2013: 9,340,663

2014: 11,236,085

2015: 16,211,875

2016: 25,817,343

2017: 31,216,357

2018: 32,260,094

2019: 32,757,068

2020: 41,338,037

2021: 38,884,355

2022: 12,018,040

2023: 10,593,334

The big news for 2023 was that I finally finished, and published, the complete edition of A SEA OF SKULLS. It appears to have been received well by the Selenoth fans as a worthy successor to A THRONE OF BONES, and since it is not available for review on Amazon, I will post the first mini-review that I have received from a reader here later today. I have already started working on the final book in the Arts of Dark and Light series, which will be called A GRAVE OF GODS, and which I plan to publish in 2026.

Last year I said that “the Bindery, Selenoth, and a revival of Castalia’s traditional publishing are my top priorities for the new year.” We made excellent progress on all three fronts, and we have improved the infrastructure to the point that we can expect to publish one or more conventional books a month in 2024. We also expect to print, bind, and ship The Iliad and The Odyssey to the Bindery backers this year; those who missed the crowdfund but wish to support the Bindery will be given the opportunity to purchase copies before we start printing them.

The biggest new development in 2023 was the launch of the Castalia History subscription. This was a massive success, as it is already two-thirds as large as the Castalia Library subscription. Books 2 and 3 are scheduled to be bound the first week of February and Book 1 will be bound soon after. Book 4 will be announced tomorrow, both here, on LibraryThing, and via the mailing list tomorrow. With regards to 2024, we recently signed deals with two major publishers and acquired the rights to two significant series, one fiction, one history, so we will be introducing two special limited edition subscriptions later this year.

THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY Vols. I and II

Both Castalia and Unauthorized are extremely healthy and technologically sound. Arkhaven remains strong despite the ongoing collapse of the comics industry, and has even introduced a new and improved frontend. While we are, as usual, behind on a number of our projects, and while we face a variety of challenges, the infrastructure is more solid than it has ever been, and for the first time, we are not reliant upon any cloud services of any kind for any of our various projects. In general, 2023 was a solid year and I believe it has laid the a foundation for a 2024 that promises to be both interesting and a strong step forward.

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Sykes-Picot is Dead

The Sykes–Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France, with the assent of Russia, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The negotiation of the treaty occurred between November 1915 and March 1916. The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916. The agreement effectively divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire outside the Arabian peninsula into areas of future British and French control or influence.

Pepe Escobar describes the geo-strategic significance of the Yemeni-imposed restrictions on Red Sea traffic and how they have proven vastly more effective than the G7 sanctions on Russia:

In chess, there always comes a time when a simple pawn is able to upset the whole chessboard, usually via a move in the back rank whose effect simply cannot be calculated.

Yes, a pawn can impose a seismic checkmate. That’s where we are, geopolitically, right now.

The cascading effects of a single move on the chessboard – Yemen’s Ansarallah stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea – reach way beyond global shipping, supply chains, and The War of Economic Corridors. Not to mention the reduction of the much lauded US Navy force projection to irrelevancy.

Yemen’s resistance movement, Ansarallah, has made it very clear that any Israel-affiliated or Israel-destined vessel will be intercepted. While the west bristles at this, and imagines itself a target, the rest of the world fully understands that all other shipping is free to pass. Russian tankers – as well as Chinese, Iranian, and Global South ships – continue to move undisturbed across the Bab al-Mandeb (narrowest point: 33 km) and the Red Sea.

Only the Hegemon is disturbed by this challenge to its ‘rules-based order.’ It is outraged that western vessels delivering energy or goods to law-breaking Israel can be impeded, and that the supply chain has been severed and plunged into deep crisis. The pinpointed target is the Israeli economy, which is already bleeding heavily. A single Yemeni move proves to be more efficient than a torrent of imperial sanctions.

It is the tantalizing possibility of this single move turning into a paradigm shift – with no return – that is adding to the Hegemon’s apoplexy. Especially because imperial humiliation is deeply embedded in the paradigm shift.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the record, is now sending an unmistakeable message: Forget the Suez Canal. The way to go is the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, call the Arctic Silk Road.

For the dumbfounded Europeans, the Russians have detailed three options: First, sail 15,000 miles around the Cap of Good Hope. Second, use Russia’s cheaper and faster Northern Sea Route. Third, send the cargo via Russian Railways.

Rosatom, which oversees the Northern Sea Route, has emphasized that non-ice-class ships are now able to sail throughout summer and autumn, and year-round navigation will soon be possible with the help of a fleet of nuclear icebreakers.

All that as direct consequences of the single Yemeni move. What next? Yemen entering BRICS+ at the summit in Kazan in late 2024, under the Russian presidency?

The US-led Armada put together for Operation Genocide Protection, which collapsed even before birth, may have been set up to “warn Iran,” apart from giving Ansarallah a scare. Just as the Houthis, Tehran is hardly intimidated because, as West Asia analyst ace Alastair Crooke succinctly put it: “Sykes-Picot is dead.”

This is a quantum shift on the chessboard. It means West Asian powers will frame the new regional architecture from now on, not US Navy “projection.”

That carries an ineffable corollary: those eleven US aircraft carrier task forces, for all practical purposes, are essentially worthless.

How Yemen changed everything, PEPE ESCOBAR, 28 December 2023

I find this move by the Yemenis, presumably made in coordination with China, Russia, and several of the Arab nations, to be utterly fascinating, and more importantly, indicative of how far ahead of Clown World the BRICS strategists appear to be thinking. While I was certain that the impotence of the US Navy was a) going to be demonstrated before 2030 and b) that demonstration would have a significant effect on the way in which the nations regarded Clown World going forward, I assumed that it would be necessary for someone to sink a carrier or three in order to demonstrate that impotence.

But this is a much more elegant approach, as the observable reluctance of the US Navy to risk any direct engagement with what is, on the international scale, a sixth-rate power, demonstrates that impotence even more clearly than the loss of an entire carrier task force in the South China Sea could. After all, only Russia possesses the striking power of the Chinese military, but most of the nations in the world have resources that exceed that of Yemen; even the military capabilities of Croatia and The Democratic Republic of the Congo are rated ahead of Yemen in the 2023 Global Firepower rankings.

It’s one thing for Russia to prove that the Empire can’t push it around, it’s another thing for the nation ranked 74th in the world to do so.

If it is not yet clear to everyone that the US empire is in rapid decline, we can be confident that it is entirely apparent to everyone whose opinion matters.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, the US government continues to demonstrate that it has not yet learned anything from the consequences of its recent attempts to poke the bear.

The United States has called for working groups from the Group of Seven (G7) countries to explore ways to confiscate hundreds of billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets, the Financial Times reported this week. The United States, backed by the UK, Japan and Canada, has proposed setting up preparatory work for expropriating over $300 billion in Russian foreign exchange reserves that were immobilized by Western nations after the start of the Ukraine conflict.

The EU, where most of the assets are blocked, is more wary of a direct confiscation, fearing possible retaliation from Moscow if the money is taken. Currently, €210 billion ($230 billion) of Russia’s reserves are held in the bloc’s financial institutions, with €191 billion in Belgium, €19 billion in France, and €7.8 billion in non-member Switzerland.

Stealing Russian assets is not the greatest plan in the world when Russia is going to be in a position to simply march some of its 1.5 million mobilized troops into some of those nations and take whatever it wants from whomever it wants within the next two years. Notice that the G7 countries which are within marching distance don’t appear to be quite as enthusiastic about offering Moscow yet another casus belli.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Tale of Two “Nationalisms”

I posted the following on Gab:

It’s really rather remarkable that self-styled “pagans” are still attempting to attribute to Christianity what are the obvious and inevitable consequences of Western post-Christianity. The mass invasions and moral inversions of the last 70 years are quite literally anti-Christian in every sense, even when they are still cloaked in Churchian-sounding nonsense. Christendom has a long and successful historical record, whereas neither the post-Christian European societies nor the post-Christian USA will last much longer. Russia is on the rise due to its Orthodox Christian revival. Therein lies the only viable solution. Nationalism is good. Christian Nationalism is better.

JungleEaglesNest1488 @voxday white nationalism the best

@JungleEaglesNest1488 No, you retard. There is no such thing as “white nationalism”. Nation is a subset of race. White nationalism is an ignorant concept invented by US mongrels to make up for the fact that they don’t have an actual nation. Swedes are not Scots. Color nationalism has failed everywhere it has been tried, beginning with the red nationalism of the 1800s.

Please do at least a modicum of research into the historical attempts over the last 200 years to create a) red nationalism, b) yellow nationalism, c) black nationalism, and d) Arab nationalism before you waste any more time advocating a retarded ideology that is absolutely doomed to total failure. One cannot build a subset on the basis of a set. This really isn’t that hard to understand.

Der Weisskunig @voxday @JungleEaglesNest1488 You admit to a Nation being a subset of a race, so how can Christian Nationalism be a thing then? Racial Nationalism makes more sense than Religious Nationalism even when if we use your logic.

@DerWeisskunig @JungleEaglesNest1488 Because you don’t understand what “Christian Nationalism” is and is not. Christian Nationalism is not “a nation of Christians” in the civic national sense. It is not a nation that is comprised of Christians of different races and tribes. It is instead an existing nation, such as the English, or the Scots, or the Swedes, who have ordered their society on a Christian basis.

The Bible makes it clear that “nations” are coherent entities which are judged on the collective basis of their nationals’ behavior. Ergo, a nation can either reject or embrace Jesus Christ as an integral aspect of its social order.

Russia is presently the best example of a Christian Nationalist nation, even though its imperialist history renders it both imperfectly Christian and imperfectly nationalist.

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Libertarians and Clown World

Argentina fails to reach escape velocity thanks to its new, self-styled-libertarian president:

Argentina has formally rejected an invitation to become a member of the BRICS group of nations, several news media outlets reported on Friday, citing an official letter they have seen which has been sent to the leaders of Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. While President Javier Milei had previously voiced his opposition to joining the alliance before being elected, the move represents a complete U-turn from the policy of his predecessor, Alberto Fernandez.

Fernandez had accepted the invitation to join the five-nation group in August, holding that such a move would offer the Latin American nation a “new scenario” for its development. Milei, who won the presidency in November, said at that time that he would not “push for deals with communists because they don’t respect the basic parameters of free trade, freedom, and democracy.”

The South American nation is currently struggling with its worst economic crisis in decades. Inflation has surged 160% over the past year alone. The severely devalued peso forced the country to refinance its $44-billion debt to the IMF. Milei’s government is also facing massive

The last paragraph is the dead giveaway. When they say “free trade, freedom, and democracy” what they really mean is “debt, debt, and more debt”. Because the only real “freedom” provided by Clown World is the freedom to borrow as much money as one’s potential creditors will allow.

This is a hard thing for most libertarians to accept. But there is no tenet of libertarianism that isn’t generally in line with Clown World’s professed ideals, beginning with free trade and the free movement of peoples. It’s as hopelessly utopian and untenable as communism in the end.

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The Consequences of Rejecting Truth

Vagrant of Rhodes observes the obvious and inescapable consequences of intentionally choosing to believe lies over the historical and observable truth:

“Migrant” parasites bragging openly about ethnically cleansing their host nations, while the rulers of those very host nations proclaim it isn’t happening, pretty much sums up what’s going on. We are witnessing the purposeful extinction of entire civilizations and barely anyone seems to even care enough to comment on the problem. In fact, every ounce of institutional power in those very host nations seems to be focused solely on bringing this extinction to fruition.

The sad part about this is that the “migrants” parasites are actually correct. In a generation, nations like Denmark, Sweden, or Germany simply will cease to exist because they’ve been replaced and genocided from the face of the earth. What’s so bizarre is that many of these places seem content to simply evaporate themselves and fork their entire heritage over to foreign conquerors, happily committing cultural suicide to maintain the so-called “principles” that led them to their own extinction.

Historians will struggle to understand this period in history, but it simply comes down to one thing: pride. Westerners view themselves with such pride and arrogance that they believe such actions are well worth the consequences. This is because they do not believe in higher power, in human nature, in truth, or in God’s justice. They see only themselves, and how to make themselves feel better, superior, or gratified in the moment. They see their own children murdered in the street, their own churches burned, their own homes stolen, and they say “I don’t want to be racist” to make themselves feel superior instead of fighting back for what’s just and righteous. They think that in order to further liberal values, they must give up everything they are or ever were to assimilate into the globo-borg and it’s false promise of eternal pleasure.

This is the poison pill in Western society: it tells you that your people and your history are meaningless, that you are simply an economic pawn in a machine of consumerism, that you are untethered from reality and should live only to indulge yourself. This insidious lie is coated in the honey of false proclamations of “peace”, “democracy”, “individualism”, “cosmopolitanism”, “diversity”, etc. All of these so-called liberal values simply lull the population into accepting the ultimate result of this system – extinction – by giving them a reason to temporarily feel better about themselves.

MPAI is a lamentable, but absolute fact. And the smug, self-centered idiots of the West have foolishly chosen to believe the lies of the children of the devil, from the lie that a nation can be an idea to the lie that a man can be a woman. The average individual of the West is such a herd animal that he would literally rather see his line, his nation, and his faith exterminated than be ostracized for violating the Narrative by speaking the historical and observable truth.

But those who deny the truth will, sooner or later, be run over by the train called Reality.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Unexpected Hitler

We’ve seen a lot of Hitlers over the last few decades, from Milosovic to Xi, but this appears to be the first Israeli Prime Minister Hitler.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is no different from Adolf Hitler, Türkiye’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said, condemning Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

Erdogan fired the new diplomatic broadside at Netanyahu on Wednesday when he delivered an opening speech at an award ceremony in Ankara. West Jerusalem now has “Nazi camps” of its own to hold Palestinians in, the president stated, implying the campaign in Gaza was as bad – or even worse – than the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany.

“We’ve seen the Nazi camps of Israel. How does this happen? They used to speak ill about Hitler, but how are you any different than Hitler?” Erdogan stated.

It will be interesting to see if the rhetoric sticks or not. It might, if it gets picked up by the Chinese media, which is rapidly becoming as influential on a global basis as the US-based media.

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Dead Internet to Fake Internet

The nerds who dreamed of uploading their minds into software and achieving a form of immortality thereby never stopped to think about the fact that if the technology to do so was ever achieved, involuntary digital immortality could be imposed upon people whether they wanted to be replaced or not. From 4chan:

I’m a Meta insider working on Project Lazarus. We’re building an Al that can take over a deceased persons social media accounts and continue making relevant posts as if that person is still alive. This includes age progressed photos, interacting with other peoples content and everything else needed so that person continues on in the digital realm after physical death. We were originally told this would be a service offered to people struggling with the loss of loved ones and people who had missing children. Seemed like a decent idea.

Things are getting weird now and I’m having second thoughts about what this is actually going to be used for. The Al is extremely capable of impersonating people. It doesn’t take as much initial input as one might think to train the Al how a certain person interacts with the digital world. It’s very convincing. An entire island of people could go missing and with little to no downtime the Al could take over all of their social media and the world wouldn’t have a clue that life wasn’t just continuing as usual. A lot of the project is becoming more compartmentalized.

Things have taken a dark turn it feels like. They’ve forbidden communication between people working on different things. Something isn’t right and I don’t know what I should do. I’m not going to post any personally identifiable information but I will try to answer questions that won’t expose my role within the project.

I always thought the excuse given – to mitigate grief – was a very thin one. And now that we’ve seen hundreds of people in a single area apparently liquidated in a short time on Maui, it appears to be fairly obvious what the purpose of this technology is.

The world is much weirder than most people are able to imagine. It increasingly appears that Christian culture was holding back old gods who are much darker than most history records.

DISCUSS ON SG