Category: Uncategorized

Paperbacks Unlimited

Just to put it on the record, here is where I think Amazon is headed over the next three years, and the effect its actions will have on the publishing industry over the next decade. I could well be wrong. I very much hope that I will be wrong, but as it stands, please note that I wasn’t pessimistic enough about the long-term effects of Kindle Unlimited when it was introduced in 2014.

2024: Audible Unlimited. Like Kindle Unlimited, but for audio. Authors get paid by the listened hour from a collective pot that is funded by Amazon’s additional $7.99 charge on top of the $11.99 paid by KU subscribers.

2025: Paperbacks Unlimited. Subscribers can pay $19.99 per month and receive any three KDP paperbacks of their choice. Authors are paid $0.99 per paperback shipped. A hardcover option will follow the next year, which will be available at a lower price point, but the subscriber will only receive one book per month, with the ability to pay more to get two or three. Hardcover compensation pays authors $2 per book shipped. It’s essentially the old book club model, writ very, very large.

The introduction of Virtua Voice makes the former viable. The purchase of print-on-demand facilities in the USA and the UK make the latter viable. And most of the bestselling KAP Unlimited authors will either be a) AI-assisted independents cranking out a new series book every month or b) fake authors created by Amazon.

If you’re an author or a publisher, you had better prepare accordingly. Because these programs are coming, and they will have the same effect on audiobook and print sales as KU has had on ebook revenues. I estimate that KAP Unlimited will have the potential to shrink total US consumer books sales from $17.4 billion to under $5 billion by 2035.

UPDATE: Apparently Audible Unlimited already exists, in the form of Audible Plus. What has changed is the ability of Amazon to inexpensively convert all of its KDP ebooks to Audible Plus audiobooks using Virtua Voice.

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The Empire Enters the Doom Loop

Ahnaf Habib, writing at The Tree of Woe, implicitly contends that that my decades-old prediction of the collapse of the USA as a singular political entity in 2033 is too optimistic:

This is a Doom Loop. All signs presently indicate that The US has entered said Loop. The gravity of the moment we are in cannot be merely dismissed on a whim of ‘hope’.

There was a time when the United States and its peoples could safely hide behind two Oceans, a robust economy, a homogenous society (ethnic, cultural and religious), technological prowess, etc. However, none of those are extant today.

America had its chance. It had an opportunity to pursue Empire in some “benevolent” capacity. It had its shot at leading the rest of world in a manner that could have been dignified, measured and temperate. It had all of that and much more.

But that is all in the past. What remains today is nothing more than “inertia”.

Men; men more clever, wise, and capable than any of the sorry lot of soy-drinking fools who claim to be “men” today in CONUS and the European satrapies; such men have long passed on. With their passing, what they built can only endure for a bit more at most.

Make no mistake: The Empire of Lies will not go down without a fight.

There are however, too many “small brushfires” worldwide to extinguish. Ergo, “Death by a Thousand Cuts” is the name of the game. Defeat is only a matter of time.

Doubts have already arisen in the Empire’s ability to secure World Trade.

This is magnified by a loss of deterrence in West Asia, in spite of the multiple carrier battle groups sent to the region to dissuade regional players.

The de facto blockade of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait by Yemen’s Ansarallah is shaping up to be the “Suez Moment” of American Empire: If the Hegemon cannot lift said blockade and guarantee the safety of global shipping, it is no longer a “Superpower.”

The fate of America was sealed by two things. First, the Civil War that established the empire. Second, the notorious 1883 poem of Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”, that to all intents and purposes replaced the Constitution of the United States.

The Republic belonged to Americans. The Empire belonged to those who adopted the foreign “Melting Pot” ideology that was introduced to denationalize the new empire and sever it from its British roots. Everything that has happened since, including the largest invasion in human history and the concomitant takeover by the same ethnic elite that ruled the Soviet Union, was a direct result of those two fatal events.

This latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended appears to be approaching its end. There is, I think, some comfort in the knowledge that there was essentially nothing that anyone living today could have done about the historical trajectory of the United States. But all empires inevitably come to an end, and it is eminently clear that the bells are tolling for the imperial USA. And while it may not seem to be the case, the collapse of the imperial USA may well turn out to be the best thing to happen for the American nation in decades, if not quite centuries.

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Leaving the Cloud

A large tech organization explains why they left the Cloud, and how much they have benefited from doing so:

Just over a year ago, we announced our intention to leave the cloud. We then shared our complete $3.2 million cloud budget for 2022, and the fact that we were going to build our own tooling rather than pay for overpriced enterprise service contracts. The mission was set!

A month later, we placed an order for $600,000 worth of Dell servers to carry our exit, and did the math to conservatively estimate $7 million in savings over the next five years. We also detailed the larger values, beyond just cost, that was driving our cloud exit. Things like independence and loyalty to the original ethos of the internet.

Still in February, we announced the new tool I had bootstrapped in a few weeks to take us out of the cloud – without giving up on all the innovation in containers and operating principles from the cloud. This was the introduction of Kamal.

Shortly thereafter, all the hardware we needed for our cloud exit arrived on pallets in our two geographically-dispersed data centers. All 4,000 vCPUs, 7,680GB of RAM, and 384TB of NVMe storage of it!

And then, in June, it was done. We had left the cloud.

To say this journey was controversial is putting it mildly. Millions of people read the updates on LinkedIn, X, and by following this very mailing list. I got thousands of comments asking for clarification, providing feedback, and expressing incredulity over our nerve to zig when others were still busy catching up to the zag.

But the proof was in the pudding. Not only did we complete our cloud exit quickly, customers scarcely noticed anything, and soon the savings started to mount. Already in September, we’d secured a million dollars in savings on the cloud bill. And as the reserved instances (where you prepay for a whole year in advance to get better pricing) started to expire, the bill just kept collapsing:

I’ve never trusted the Cloud. And I’m very pleased to be able to say that as of last week, we no longer have a single project that is on the Cloud. While it may be useful in the initial stages of a project that isn’t capable of sustaining itself, the sooner one can move off the Cloud and onto one’s own servers, the better off one is likely to be.

And that doesn’t even begin to get into the peril of relying upon a corporation filled with SJWs who enjoy nothing more than playing thought police and denying corporate services to anyone they don’t like or of whom they don’t approve.

On a not-unrelated note, the Arktoons devs have successfully defeated a DDOS attack on the site. It’s good to be able to handle these things on our own, and not be dependent upon the security of the Cloud services company. If you were having problems accessing the site last night, it should be fine today.

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Tuesday Arktoons

GIVE MY REGARDS TO BLACK JACK Episode 36: Whoever is Ready

GORGO Episode 37: The Return of Gorgo

RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 41: Boston Low-T Party

THE LOST ERA TRANSCRIPTS Episode 28: Story Six: The Anise Fields

THE SIDEWINDERS Episode 50: All Damnation Riding

REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 93: The Devil’s Work

A MIND PROGRAMMED Episode 46: Three Ways to Hide

STONETOSS Episode 251: Tournament of Power

COSMIC HORRORS Episode 8: The Temple

TREASURY OF TALES Episode 31: King Winter

REBEL DEAD REVENGE

Gunning for the Dollar

Russia is openly advocating for other nations to follow the lead of itself and China in abandoning the dollar standard for international trade:

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in a statement, that it is very important for all the BRICS member states that they develop sustainable financial relations and settlements within the organization. He made the statement while speaking on Monday at the Russia-China Financial Dialog in Beijing, where he was conducting meetings with Lan Foan, his Chinese counterpart.

The BRICS alliance of developing nations, made up currently of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, has been hashing out ways for member countries to make payments in local currencies. The bloc wants to accelerate its growth by reducing its reliance on the US dollar and the euro.

Siluanov said, “We need to further develop financial cooperation within the BRICS countries. Here we see opportunities … to develop a payments system that would be independent of the infrastructure, which does not always fully fulfill the goals of individual countries. Therefore, the sustainable development of financial relations and settlements on the BRICS platform is important for us, and we believe that it is necessary to work out such issues, and today we will consider a number of them.”

We have the rare historical privilege to witness the decline and fall of an empire. While we tend to think of such things as being sudden and catastrophic events, they actually tend to take place over such an extended period of time that most of the empire’s inhabitants don’t even realize anything is changing until well after the changes have taken place and they have become accustomed to the consequences.

The events of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire take place over century. The decline of the US empire is only measured in decades at this point, but even at this accelerated rate, it is taking place too slowly for the average individual to comprehend, even if he is sufficiently acute to notice some of the changes.

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Clown World is ALWAYS Fake

This is why you will seldom see me reacting to a CURRENT NEWS story anymore. Some of the reported items are legit, some of them are accurate in part, and a substantial percentage of them are little more than public theatre performed for the benefit of the masses, as Lara Logan observes:

Rep. Clay Higgins tells reporter that he has SEEN VIDEO EVIDENCE of POLICE walking into rooms, and then RE-EMERGING, dressed as TRUMP SUPPORTERS and CONSTRUCTION WORKERS. Also, GROUPS of what appear to be TRUMP SUPPORTERS roaming the HALLS OF THE CAPITAL well before the BREACH!

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Everything in January 2020 was orchestrated and stage-managed. Very little of it was organic or real. While we don’t know what the actual truth is, we can be 100-percent confident that the official version is substantially, if not entirely, false.

“Conspiracy Theory” is just another name for what actually happened.

DISCUSS ON SG

Adverse Effects in Switzerland

An insurance company reveals the consequences of Switzerland’s vaxx campaign:

According to Helsana, a major Swiss health insurance company, since 2016 the number of patients receiving cancer treatments has decreased. However, something changed in 2021 and 2022.

In 2021, Helsana’s data shows there was a dramatic increase of 73% compared to 2020 in the number of patients receiving cancer treatments. And the high number of cancer patients continued in 2022 with an increase of 74% compared to 2020. Switzerland began its mass covid vaccination campaign on 23 December 2020.

  • 2017: 33,339 heart attacks, 27,584 strokes and 116,603 cases of cancer.
  • 2022: 170,000 heart attacks, 124,515 strokes and 460,771 cases of cancer.

So, that’s a 410 percent increase in heart attacks, 351 percent increase in strokes, and 295 percent increase in cancer. All of which are directly attributable to the Covid vaccines.

Never, ever, trust the science or the experts. It will literally kill you.

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Orcs in the Korokhurmagh

This is a previously unreleased excerpt from the newly released full edition of A SEA OF SKULLS, which is now available in an ebook edition at the Arkhaven store.

Lugbol growled and slapped at one of the forest’s infernal insects that was busily engaged in biting his left bicep. He crushed it under his horny palm, felt a pop, and looked down to see he’d smeared his own dark green blood along with the remnants of the bug that had bitten him across his upper arm. He shook his head, knowing that the bite was going to start itching momentarily, then slapped fruitlessly at another one that had just bitten his calf.
“I don’t remember them being this bad before,” he complained.
“They had all the dead to feed on then,” Ghurash replied. Even though it had been less than three weeks since they’d fled the dark shadows of the Korokhurmagh, already the denizens of the forest had all but picked the thousands of dead bodies clean of flesh. They were rapidly approaching the western edge of the great wood and soon they would be encroaching on the true Man lands, not merely the pillaging the small villages and hamlets that had been carved out of the trees by the lesser tribes and clans.
The Hagahorn’ugh had been cocky and full of contempt for the martial abilities of the Szavon’agh as they passed through the burned-out remains of the villages overrun by Zlatagh’s army, but they gradually fell silent and their mood turned grim as they began to come across one large-skulled, thick-boned skeleton after another. There were few Man skeletons, and the bones of those they encountered were eagerly snatched up and divided among sqwaaks and younger kors seeking clubs or remains to decorate their armor.
More than a dozen fights broke out over the Man bones, the worst of which began when a boar rider commandeered a large thigh bone another kor had intended for a club, then cracked it open and sucked out the marrow. By the time Lugbol and Karnuhg, one of the cavalry grun-kors, managed to put a stop to the fracas, four mountain orcs and two Black Fists were dead, and another Hagahornu was so badly wounded that he ended up in the cookpot that evening.
The kral chewed him out for the needless death of his orcs, of course, but Lugbol had the sneaking suspicion that the older orc was secretly impressed at how Lugbol’s veteran kors managed to more than hold their own against the bigger mountain orcs. In fact, knowing that Lugbol, being Goghu and half the size of his Hagahornu officers, could never pose a threat to his rule, Nekheru had proven increasingly inclined to give his new hadvezer more responsibilities as they marched through the forest toward the Man lands. In addition to commanding the light infantry and the goblin cavalry, Lugbol was now serving as the liason between the farkh’agh and the various shugaba’ugh and grun-kors whose kors had the annoying habit of feasting upon their fellow marching companions whenever they couldn’t find adequate meat to sate their appetites.
Two large goblins, wearing the ornate headgear favored by their shugaba’agh, approached him now, escorted by a nervous-looking bodyguard of twelve lightly-armored yellowskins carrying pikes. Lugbol groaned. Given the angry expressions on their hook-chinned, hook-nosed faces, he had a pretty good idea of why they were coming to see him, even though they were attached to units outside his command.

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