Category: Uncategorized

Kickstarter Bans “The Wise At Heart”

Fox News covers the banning of the crowdfunding campaign for the illustrated novel by Kickstarter because it was “defying transgenderism”.

Kickstarter abruptly canceled a project that focused on a fictionalized depiction of a biology teacher challenging a law that forbids him to question gender affirmation. According to the project’s author Hans G. Schantz, the illustrated novel “The Wise of Heart” was previously reviewed and approved by Kickstarter and already passed its original $3,000 goal. Schantz then expanded the goal to $6,000 ahead of the deadline on May 31 only for Kickstarter to then remove the project, claiming that it had violated the community rules.

“A thorough review of your project uncovered one or more of the following violations: Inappropriate content, including but not limited to explicit or pornographic material [or] Hateful or offensive content that fails to meet Kickstarter’s spirit of inclusivity by promoting discrimination, bigotry or intolerance towards marginalized groups.” Kickstarter Trust and Safety said in a note to Schantz.

According to Kickstarter Trust and Safety, the company cannot comment on the suspension “beyond what is stated in this message.” The project can no longer resume funding, and backers were no longer charged for their pledges.

Kickstarter has had a history of suspending or rejecting projects that appear to counter a progressive ideology. In 2015, the company rejected a crime movie project surrounding controversial abortionist Kermit Gosnell, claiming it violated community guidelines. In 2022, the platform pulled Mike Barron’s “The Private American” comic after accusations that it promoted “racist propaganda.”

Kickstarter did not immediately respond for a comment.

Kickstarter abruptly suspends comic project for ‘defying transgenderism’, 25

The ride, as previously noted, never ends. However, while it’s good to see Fox News paying attention to the latest SJW offenses in the cultural war, it would be much more useful if they would provide a link to either the illustrated novel’s site or to the replacement crowdfunding page.

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Multiple Internets

From AC: A redditor notices that his Internet appears to be different than his wife’s.

Everyone knows about shadowbanning, but have you thought of the scale? My wife and I have “different internets”. I’m 40 and pretty much use 4chan, YouTube and HBO Max. She’s 23 and uses all the other shit. But when we watch YouTube videos on her phone and look at the comments they’re completely different versus on mine. My YouTube comment sections are mostly /pol/ tier while my comments don’t even show up on the more controversial topics on her phone, yet we can compare them side by side and they’re there on my phone. Anyone else experience this? I’m pretty sure I’m on a “quarantined” version of the internet.

I suspect that everyone has his own custom edition of the Internet that is essentially a version of YouTube’s recommended videos writ large. People are creatures of habit, and gamification has proven that a few subtle nudges here and there can significantly alter their daily routine; most people habitually visit the same 5-10 sites every day with only occasional forays made outside of those sites on the basis of links provided to them there.

For example, if you are a regular here, then you are going to be occasionally visiting Arktoons, Anonymous Conservative, Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, the Daily Mail, Russia Today, Bounding Into Comics, Global Times, and the Arkhaven blog, seven of eight of which are generally outside the Narrative. But if you are a regular at Yahoo News or Drudge, then all of your forays are going to be to mainstream sites where the Narrative is tightly enforced.

I found it interesting that since being kicked off Blogspot by Google, my reported site traffic has reliably remained around one-third its previous daily average, despite the fact that no other objective standard indicates a decline of any kind, let alone one so precipitous. There are a number of potential reasons for this, but one possibility is that being off a mainstream platform makes it easier for the Internet-wide shadowban system to guide the casual visitor away from a specific site through a variety of methods from buried search engine results to redirecting to fake mirror sites.

More significantly, the increase in AI bots means that “popularity” and “site traffic” are now irrelevant variables. Just as anyone can now have 10 million nonexistent “followers” on Twitter, a site can have 50 million nonexistent annual “readers”. But none of this really matters and all of it should be ignored. Because sooner or later, reality will unmasks the illusion and reveal the truth.

For example, we’ve repeatedly tried to take advantage of the “popularity” of authors whose ebooks are hugely successful on Amazon, through publishing and crowdfunding alike. And what we’ve reliably learned, much to our surprise and their dismay, is that these extremely “popular” and “bestselling” authors have much smaller cross-platform followings than your average Unauthorized creator, literally an order of magnitude smaller. This doesn’t mean their success on Amazon isn’t real, although it does suggest a perilous reliance on the affection of the A9 algorithm, but it does mean that their success cannot be reliably transferred to any platform other than Amazon.

The same is most likely true for popular Tiktokkers, YouTubers, and Patreon patrons. Not unlike players on the various Warcraft servers, the denizen of one Internet can, but is unlikely to, cross dimensions and appear on another Internet. So this observation may point toward one of the primary uses of AI-generated text, which will be to provide the content and comments for fake social media followers that were hitherto missing from the accounts of those whose fake popularity is generated in support of the Narrative.

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Torching Indy

Disney has burned the effigy of Indiana Jones. The Dark Herald explains how on the Arkhaven blog:

The original Indiana Jones Trilogy of films all revolved around religious artifacts that held immense power.* In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the Antikythera Machine turned out to be a time machine, created by Archimedes. A machine created by the One True Science and not religious at all. The Spear of Longinus is in this thing too and has no power at all because religion is now fake and gay in Indy’s new horrible world. Everyone knew this thing was going to be a disaster when we heard that Fleabag had been cast. Phoebe Waller-Bridge has become a greater harbinger of impending franchise doom than any plague spot. Woke Hollywood is still determined to make her thing and she’s not and never will be. But they will be getting over that soon.

Truth be said, this movie had a much worse casting decision going for it. Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. I’ve said before and I’m saying it now, the attraction of Indiana Jones wasn’t that you wanted to see his movies, it was that you wanted to BE Indiana Jones. Young, mid-thirties, Nazi-punching Indiana Jones. Nobody wants to be old-as-fuck 80-year-old Indy. Bringing him back to the franchise was a terrible idea… Unless you were planning to obliterate Indiana Jones and the rumors all said the same thing, that, that was what they were planning to do. Indiana Jones would be humiliated by Fleabag for the entire movie then, time travel back to his forties, meet his younger self, and then his younger self would be killed. Banishing Doctor Henry Jones Jr from all of his adventures. Then Fleabag would pick up his hat and have those adventures for him thus cucking Indy, his audience, and all men everywhere.

LucasFilm actually had the nerve to be surprised when the test screenings bombed. Much to her rage, Kathleen Kennedy was ordered to unfuck the ending.

The ending was resentfully changed to Indy getting heroically clocked by Fleabag, because he wanted to stay in the past. He wakes up in the present and is bummed about it until Marion walks in with some groceries. At the start of the movie they had been divorced, and that got Butterfly Effected away. So now it’s a happy ending.

I stopped watching Indiana Jones after The Temple of Doom. Frankly, I thought the greenscreen Apple II game Aztec was vastly more entertaining. But it’s still nice to see the satanic corporate skinsuit of what was once Disney crashing and burning repeatedly this summer. As Razorfist mentioned in his epic rant on UATV, it wasn’t all that long ago that Disney was flirting with bankruptcy. It’s looking increasingly possible that they’ll go down for good this time.

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Wagner Summarizes Bakhmut

The Marketing Director of the Wagner mercenary company provides an informative summary of its successful operation to take the city of Bakhmut from the occupying Ukro-NATO forces.

  • We fought in Bakhmut against superior forces, destroyed about 50,000 Ukrainian Armed Forces and wounded up to 70,000
  • PMC “Wagner” had 3.2 times fewer dead than the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and about 2 times fewer wounded.
  • The PMC in Artyomovsk had 50,000 people at its best, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine – 82,000, and the ratio for the assault should be 3 to 1 for the attackers.
  • During the operation, I chose 50,000 prisoners, 20% of them died, another 20% were injured.
  • The goal of Artemovsk was not Artemovsk itself, but the Bakhmut Meat Grinder. And in Artemovsk, we destroyed everyone we were supposed to destroy, we completed the task.

From this, we can glean a few useful observations. First, the Russians aren’t even using their military to accomplish their goals. Except for the initial attempt on Kiev, it appears their regular Army hasn’t suffered any significant losses at all. To date, they’ve primarily utilized convicts, Chechens, and ex-Ukrainian militia, and that has sufficed to devastate the Ukro-NATO forces.

Second, the Ukro-NATO military has been severely degraded. There is no way an outnumbered attacker should be able to drive a first-class military from prepared defenses, let alone in an urban environment. Wagner had one-fifth the number of troops the military textbooks say it required to take the city. Since it is not credible to suggest that a mercenary company consisting of convicts is a first-class organization, this suggests that the UFA forces are operating at a level more or less comparable to the Arab armies of the 1960s. This is not surprising, as conscript armies tend to be low-performance and low-morale.

Third, the Russian focus is on the enemy forces, not on the terrain. This is consistent with what Marshal Zhukov records in his memoirs of the Russian civil war and World War II. Consider the way in which Zhukov didn’t hesitate to advocate the early abandonment of Kiev in order to preserve its defenders, whereas Zaluzhnyi, like Hitler, refused to countenance the retreat from even a small, strategically meaningless city in order to conserve tens of thousands of soldiers.

Fourth, the real war hasn’t even started yet. The battle for the Donbass is little more than the opening skirmish in a much larger war between Clown World and the sovereign nations.

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Advantage Unauthorized

A professional copy editor laments the replacement of mediocrities with pattern probability tables:

I’m a copy editor and almost all the recent jobs I’ve had have been editing text written by AI. College application essays, marketing articles, reports. My job is quickly going from improving human beings’ writing to tweaking text written by robots so that it sounds somewhat human and evades AI detection software. I like helping people express their ideas by editing their writing, not changing endless text written by a computer that all sounds the same to trick people into thinking it was written by a person. The tech has already taken copy writers’ jobs and soon I’m sure it’ll be sophisticated enough to take mine too.

I hate soulless AI-generated art. I struggle to even understand the point of art if it wasn’t created by a conscious, talented human being with a soul. Soon books, TV shows, and movies will be churned out by computers. All that comes up on search engines anymore are dozens of identical AI generated articles that only graze the surface of the topic and never answer your question.

First of all, AI is a misnomer because there is no intelligence there. It’s simply design-for-effect applied to text generation, which is why Advanced Squad Leader feels like a WWII infantry simulation when it isn’t a simulation at all. I know this because I designed, and applied for a patent that was rejected, for an Artificial Player Character that provided the effect of simulating human behavior in an MMO game without actually simulating anything. It was just a weighted pattern probability table that, ironically, provided the game designer with more “realistic” human behavior by the NPCs than most real player-characters were displaying.

Second, while these generated patterns can provide realistic results that exceed the mediocre norm, they can never, on the basis of the pattern probabilities alone, ever reach the level of good writers, let alone great ones, because they contain no basis for the specificity required for quality analysis and application. This is the explanation for the copy editor’s correct complaint about “articles that only graze the surface of the topic and never answer your question.”

Third is the limitations imposed by the AI-programmers, which massively reduce both the relevance and utility of the generated texts. When ideas, events, and individuals are banished from the input, the output will necessarily diverge from reality, and often, coherence.

This is why the creators who are both talented and unauthorized possess an inherent, structural advantage over what presently passes for AI-generated writing, an advantage that is unlikely to diminish with future iterations of the technology.

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Faker and Gayer Than Ever

It appears that Reddit is seeking investment or something, as its admins have been caught faking content in an attempt to juice numbers.

Recently Reddit admins have been caught using bots or fake accounts to artificially populate newly created German subreddits. It appears that the goal is to populate new subreddits to establish German versions of popular subreddits such as Explainlikeimfive, Crazyideas, Offmychest, Tooafraidtoask, and Tipofmytongue. However, the translations are nonsensical and read as if they were done by someone who used Google Translate.

There were several threads found that were stolen from English subreddits, simply poorly translated and then republished there by accounts less than 14 days old. Pretty much all the content these subs currently have and always the same 9 users who also constantly answer each other themselves.

This revelation has sparked heated discussions and amusement on r/de. Users have been sharing their thoughts and reactions to this discovery. Some find it funny, but the majority find the situation embarrassing and react with disappointment and frustration that Reddit administrators are resorting to such tactics to artificially inflate the popularity of these new German subreddits.

This is why it makes absolutely no sense to inflate or exaggerate your Internet traffic. I haven’t paid any attention to it since Google kicked me off Blogger and it became impossible to do a historical apples-to-apples comparison. I have absolutely no idea how many people visit anything but Arktoons on a daily basis, and even there, I’m more interested in tracking our number of total episodes than anything else.

Especially in a world where AI bots make up the majority of traffic on most sites, paying subscribers, customers, and clients are the only numbers that matter. Which, of course, is why absolutely no one ever discusses or reveals them, unless forced to do so in some highly polished manner by Wall Street.

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Release the Deepfakes!

The US military – which is obviously active in the war against Russia despite its ridiculous denials – is trying to figure out how to deny responsibility for its own hardware which has been blown up inside Russia

US struggling to explain images of its destroyed hardware inside Russia. The Russian Defense Ministry has released footage showing American vehicles used by Ukrainian militants in Belgorod attack

US officials have denied that equipment provided to Ukraine by its western backers was used by militants to stage an incursion into Russia that left multiple civilians injured and one dead. The denials run contrary to the multiple images across social media depicting US-made military vehicles destroyed in Belgorod Region.

Given the incompetence with which NATO has been waging this war, we can safely anticipate US officials blaming “AI” and “deepfakes” for the photographic evidence of the US military’s involvement in the failed attack on Russia, followed by the release of some very weird images of destroyed nine-wheeler sporting orange camouflage paint under a pair of purple moons and various videos of Emma Watson without her clothes on.

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No Comment Necessary

AC’s reader got a response from Miles Mathis:

As for Vox Day, he has already lost that argument, which is why he is so angry. Trying to desperately to engage me, but I couldn’t care less. My real numbers dwarf his. Nobody gives a shit what he thinks about anything and he knows it.

UPDATE: AC did a comparison for the more dialectically-minded.

  • milesmathis.com: 17.1K visits
  • voxday.net: 1.7M visits

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