#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
FAIRY DOOR Episode 9: Through the Door
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 208 No Sham Pain
STREET FIGHTING MAN Episode 6: Capture the Flag
VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 197: Trauma Class
WARMAN Episode 41: Death Magic
FRUG THE WANDERER OF THE WASTELAND Episode 4: Frug goes flying
Do you know why we haven’t sent any of you any emails for the last two years? Because the so-called email services refused to do what is literally their one job. After looking around for one that might actually be interested in providing the services it sells, Castalia House just sent its first mass email in two years today. And it turns out that if ONE SINGLE RECIPIENT decides to complain about nonexistent “abuse”, the retarded email “services” literally FREEZE THE SENDER’S ACCOUNT. Never mind how many thousands of people opened it, clicked on it, or otherwise interacted positively with the email.
So, if you can’t bother to follow the blog or the SG/Gab account, you’re out of luck. Deal with it. There is literally nothing we can do about it.
It’s going to be interesting to see how the restaurant business or the entertainment business fares if one unsatisfied customer is sufficient to shut down the entire operation.
UPDATE: The restrictions have been removed. And the provider is now aware that we are not inclined to tolerate the ridiculous policy. So we’ll continue to use it for now, but we already have backup options in place and will continue to work on improving our communications systems.
London is not only ruled by a Punjabi and a Pakistani, the former capital city of the English is now literally owned by Indians:
Indians Now Own More Real Estate in London Than the English
More real estate in London is owned by Indian proprietors than by the native English population, a new study has revealed.
According to the London-based property developer Barratt London, English property owners are the second-biggest group in their own capital, sandwiched between Pakistani proprietors below and Indian property owners at the top.
Empire is a slow-growing cancer on a nation. Having seen what has become of the English empire and what global empire has done to America, do you really believe that China, much less Russia, harbors similar ambitions of global domination?
The multipolarity that Clown World’s two great enemies both presently profess is not a sham or a ruse. To the contrary, it is a conscious rejection of imperial ambitions due to wise and intelligent leadership understanding the long-term cost to future generations of ruling over foreign peoples for the benefit of the current generation.
The wages of empire are foreign ownership and occupation.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. Clarkesworld science fiction magazine is forced to close to submissions by a flood of ChatGTP entries.
Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn’t be hard to guess why.
- We aren’t closing the magazine. Closing submissions means that we aren’t considering stories from authors at this time. We will reopen, but have not set a date.
- We don’t have a solution for the problem. We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn’t going away. Detectors are unreliable. Pay-to-submit sacrifices too many legit authors. Print submissions are not viable for us.
- Various third-party tools for identity confirmation are more expensive than magazines can afford and tend to have regional holes. Adopting them would be the same as banning entire countries.
- We could easily implement a system that only allowed authors that had previously submitted work to us. That would effectively ban new authors, which is not acceptable. They are an essential part of this ecosystem and our future.
- The people causing the problem are from outside the SF/F community. Largely driven in by “side hustle” experts making claims of easy money with ChatGPT. They are driving this and deserve some of the disdain shown to the AI developers.
- Our guidelines already state that we don’t want “AI” written or assisted works. They don’t care. A checkbox on a form won’t stop them. They just lie.
I don’t know why this strikes me as particularly funny, but it does. Especially because it won’t be long before SFWA has its first fake member, given the way the most successful clout-chasing con artists think. Wracking up three professional publications wouldn’t be hard, and I don’t think the ever-so-inclusive organization has any specific requirement that its members be human or actually exist.
It has to be admitted. For all its evil and awfulness, Clown World can be amusing sometimes.
I should probably update the numbers. But as of 2008, the figures were 1,763 wars, of which 6.98 percent could be reasonably connected to religion of any kind, half of which involved Islam. Statistically speaking, an attack on religion in war is intrinsically anti-Islamic.
And Jack is right to bring up Chinese civil wars. They were unbelievably brutal.
James O’Keefe is not the only effective leader who has recently been ejected from the organization he founded.
For years the Frontline Doctors have courageously stepped forward to protect Americans.
From our previous Gateway Pundit articles the Frontline Doctors spoke out to:
** Stop forced experimental vaccines
** Stop forced experimental vaccines on children
** Stop forced experimental drugs on commercial pilots
** Allow HCQ as permissible and effective treatment for COVID virus
** Stop the use of failed Ebola drup Remdesivir for treatment of COVID
** COVID vaccines can change the timing of the menstrual cycleIn a hostile takeover bid, the AFLDS Board of Directors is attempting to remove Dr. Simone Gold from the organization she founded and worked tirelessly for to defend medical freedom and civil rights.
It’s not just politics. Jack Nicklaus not only got ejected from the Nicklaus Companies, but is actually getting sued by his own company for trying to put his own name on his own work.
By hiring advisers to help sell a minority share (49%) of his companies, Nicklaus hoped to find a partner who would help the company grow beyond where Nicklaus had taken it… The deal would never be what Milstein or Nicklaus foresaw, and the finances of Nicklaus Companies would continually run below projections, which would require additional financing and eventually control of the company going from Nicklaus to Milstein.
Nicklaus had a year left on his original employment agreement he signed in 2007 and, with the poor fortunes of the company, was looking to terminate his employment and let his five-year noncompete run out so he could be free of the company by ’17.
“Howard subsequently asked me not to terminate my employment and instead give him the opportunity to turn the company around in the wake of the recession,” Nicklaus said. “I felt that was the right thing to do, so I agreed to accept what became known as the ‘Employment, Governance and Control Agreement.’”
The agreement changed Nicklaus’s compensation, tying it to the company’s revenue from design and marketing projects.
The new agreement also gave Emigrant Bank governance and control of the board of managers and made Milstein the board’s co-chairman.
It also gave Milstein the controlling vote of all major decisions.
Don’t take the money. Never take the money. Once you take the money, they own you, even if you think it is only “a minority share”. And almost as importantly, never, ever cut it close. When you try to get cute and cut things close, someone always finds a way to push the ball across the line, one way or another.
The man is a rhetorical maestro. Three words + one picture = killer meme. And if this triggers or upsets or angers you in any way, you desperately need to revisit your core assumptions.
BOB Episode 114: Stunning and Breaveheart
VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 196: Retirement
CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON Episode 95: Look But Don’t Touch
BEN GARRISON Episode 93: Biden’s Bike Fall
STONETOSS Episode 165: Bad Neighborhood
The Dark Herald is suspicious. Not deeply suspicious. But a little.
I had suspected that an AI generator came up with some of Rings of Power’s more cringe-worthy dialog.
Finrod: Why does a stone sink? Because it cannot look up.
That line is exactly the kind of thing an AI generator comes up with. The words can be made to sound like wisdom by an actor trying his damndest but give it any kind of sapient thought and it falls into the uncanny valley.
But I didn’t think the whole thing was written that way.
But those AI guys I chatted with are convinced that a new Amazon AI wrote the entire thing. That any human involvement at all was only there to sand off edges that were just too rough.
The big tell for them is the number of things that are produced by a mind that simply doesn’t know any better. Like Galadriel going for a swim in the middle of the ocean or the townspeople giving up their easily defendable castle to move back to their completely indefensible town. It was something that happened and it had dramatic impact, of a sort, but again taken as a whole the concept falls into the uncanny valley. Every episode had something like this in it. Adar’s rousing “brothers and sisters in our own land” speech was weird and out of place when applied to orcs. And of course “Feed me the meat and give it to me raw.” Every single episode was full of things like this.
Then there were all of these incongrous and conflicting events, that frequently had me yelling, “didn’t you read your own damn script?” Individual events sound plausible in isolation but can’t be turned into a coherent structure when taken as a whole. Mostly because the AI isn’t looking for that problem. And the Bad Reboot guys may not have been allowed to correct it. I could understand a couple of frustrated Hollywood nobodies being willing to sign a suicide before reading NDA if it got them something made and they could take credit for it. A high-level failure is still high level, people will be returning their calls.
Was that the real point of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power just a big experiment by Amazon to see if an entire mega hit could be created by AI?
I couldn’t possibly say, because I didn’t watch one single second of it despite being an inveterate Tolkien fan who had read The Silmarillion before finishing high school. As well as, of course, the trilogy and the Hobbit enough times to wear out the white books that came in the gold boxed set in the early ’80s.
But it does make one wonder. Because if Amazon hasn’t tried it yet, someone is going to do so soon.
The President of Russia addresses the Federal Assembly. It does not appear to be a direct declaration of war or even an announcement of the launch of the anticipated military offensive. It’s wise to read the whole thing directly, as the Clown World media coverage of it is literally worse than useless, quoting the responses to the speech before the speech was even given or the transcript released.
So far, only the very first part of the official English transcript has been released, but the whole thing will eventually be posted here by the Kremlin’s press agency.
This Presidential Address comes, as we all know, at a difficult, watershed period for our country. This is a time of radical, irreversible change in the entire world, of crucial historical events that will determine the future of our country and our people, a time when every one of us bears a colossal responsibility.
One year ago, to protect the people in our historical lands, to ensure the security of our country and to eliminate the threat coming from the neo-Nazi regime that had taken hold in Ukraine after the 2014 coup, it was decided to begin the special military operation. Step by step, carefully and consistently we will deal with the tasks we have at hand.
Since 2014, Donbass has been fighting for the right to live in their land and to speak their native tongue. It fought and never gave up amid the blockade, constant shelling and the Kiev regime’s overt hatred. It hoped and waited that Russia would come to help.
In the meantime, as you know well, we were doing everything in our power to solve this problem by peaceful means, and patiently conducted talks on a peaceful solution to this devastating conflict.
This appalling method of deception has been tried and tested many times before. They behaved just as shamelessly and duplicitously when destroying Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. They will never be able to wash off this shame. The concepts of honour, trust, and decency are not for them.
Over the long centuries of colonialism, diktat and hegemony, they got used to being allowed everything, got used to spitting on the whole world. It turned out that they treat people living in their own countries with the same disdain, like a master. After all, they cynically deceived them too, tricked them with tall stories about the search for peace, about adherence to the UN Security Council resolutions on Donbass. Indeed, the Western elites have become a symbol of total, unprincipled lies.
We firmly defend our interests as well as our belief that in today’s world there should be no division into so-called civilised countries and all the rest and that there is a need for an honest partnership that rejects any exclusivity, especially an aggressive one.
We were open and sincerely ready for a constructive dialogue with the West; we said and insisted that both Europe and the whole world needed an indivisible security system equal for all countries, and for many years we suggested that our partners discuss this idea together and work on its implementation. But in response, we received either an indistinct or hypocritical reaction, as far as words were concerned. But there were also actions: NATO’s expansion to our borders, the creation of new deployment areas for missile defence in Europe and Asia – they decided to take cover from us under an ‘umbrella’ – deployment of military contingents, and not just near Russia’s borders.
I would like to stress –in fact, this is well-known – that no other country has so many military bases abroad as the United States. There are hundreds of them – I want to emphasise this – hundreds of bases all over the world; the planet is covered with them, and one look at the map is enough to see this.
The whole world witnessed how they withdrew from fundamental agreements on weapons, including the treaty on intermediate and shorter-range missiles, unilaterally tearing up the fundamental agreements that maintain world peace. For some reason, they did it. They do not do anything without a reason, as we know.
Finally, in December 2021, we officially submitted draft agreements on security guarantees to the USA and NATO. In essence, all key, fundamental points were rejected. After that it finally became clear that the go-ahead for the implementation of aggressive plans had been given and they were not going to stop.
Read the rest there.