Divisional Round, Day 2

Yesterday went as expected. Atlanta walked over Seattle and New England had no trouble with Houston. Today, I think Dallas will run over the Green Bay defense and keep the ball out of Aaron Rodgers’s lethal hands enough to win. No idea about Pittsburgh vs Kansas City, except that if it’s close late, Mike Tomlin will manage the clock better than Andy Reid.

UPDATE: Wow! Incredible play by Rodgers, both to not fumble the ball on the sack, then to hit Cook to set up the game-winning field goal. But the game was lost, not won, by the Dallas coaching staff. I couldn’t BELIEVE it when they downed the ball on 1-and-10, then didn’t run the ball twice when facing third-and-3.

If you don’t play to win in the playoffs, chances are you’re going to lose. And Jason Garrett did not play to win. What on EARTH was he thinking, to give the ball back to Aaron Rodgers with 35 seconds and two time outs in a tie game?

Mailvox: the illustrated shiv

VFM #7634 wasn’t entirely sure to whom Literally Who’s self-outing as… something was referring.

I’m confused… is this another post about Scalzi?

No, as it happens, THIS is a tremendous post about the most important author in science fiction history, the Fifth of the Big Three, the biggest, baddest, bestselling dog at Tor Books, the man with more Hugo nominations than Arthur C. Clarke or Jerry Pournelle and more Hugo Awards than Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey, Gregory Benford, Norman Spinrad, Terry Pratchett and Iain M. Banks combined, the writer whose innovative “he said, he said, he said” structure has shocked and awed and intimidated the entire science fiction writing community and forever altered the way it approaches writing dialogue.

Our case study today is John Scalzi, a quisling male emblematic of so much that has gone haywire with White American men (and their beards).

Exhibit A: This is Scalzi’s Christmas card. He signed off on it. He approved of it. This is how he wants the world to see him.

Exhibit B: Scalzi in love. Here Scalzi is in the submissive position, an obvious inferior looking up to his wifely better.

Exhibit C: Scalzi smooches. Kissing upward and nuzzling his doughy face into hard manjawline, eyes closed as his hunky lady peers into the middle distance looking burdened with the weight of the world (or for an escape from her husband’s octopus lips), Scalzi eagerly inverts the sexual polarity, taking on the role of the woman in his marriage, ceding all the T to his wife.

Exhibit D: Serious Scalzi. Scalzi tries to look serious (ie like a normal man), but is still out-mugged by his wife, who looks more serious, and tougher, than him.

People have mostly given up trying to sell the narrative, but I always found it bizarre when people tried to claim that I envied John Scalzi. On what planet, and for what reason, would I, or any man, ever envy a gamma male like that?

I find the most interesting thing about Scalzi to be the fact that he somehow managed to delay the inevitable gamma self-implosion until he reached a much higher level of success than is conventionally the case. This suggests that his implosion, when it inevitably comes, is going to be absolutely spectacular.

The best part of the Chateau post is the comments from the women there.

  • What I really despise about this guy is that he’s contributing to the further ruin of science fiction. So why do these mannish women latch on to these beta guys? Seeing stuff like this out of a man makes me hurt inside. It’s instinctive, like being scared of rattlesnakes. How do women kill them in themselves, and why would they want to?
  • Exhibit B made my ovaries shrivel.
  • Who’s that gay bloke standing next to the giant woman?

Some might fear that the lack of compassion and respect shown in this post might cost Heartiste any chance of being nominated for the Vox Day Mutual Respect Award from The Vox Day Center for Mutual Respect. However, I would observe that the metric for the Vox Day Mutual Respect Award given out by The Vox Day Center for Mutual Respect is “showing compassion and respect” for one’s “fellow man”, and therefore, due to the subject’s observable lack of any identifiable signs of actual manhood, it would not be correct to hold this post against le Chateau.

Thank you for caring.

Closing down corruption

Even prior to his ascendance, the God-Emperor Ascendant is cleaning up corruption in America by putting the Clinton Machine out of business:

The Clinton Foundation’s long list of wealthy donors and foreign government contributors during the 2016 elections provoked critics to allege conflicts of interests. Clinton partisans defended the organization’s charitable work, and dismissed claims that it served as a means for the Clintons to sell off access, market themselves on the paid speech circuit, and elevate their brand as Hillary Clinton campaigned for the presidency.

But as soon as Clinton lost the election, many of the criticisms directed toward the Clinton Foundation were reaffirmed. Foreign governments began pulling out of annual donations, signaling the organization’s clout was predicated on donor access to the Clintons, rather than its philanthropic work. In November, the Australian government confirmed it “has not renewed any of its partnerships with the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation, effectively ending 10 years of taxpayer-funded contributions worth more than $88 million.” The government of Norway also drastically reduced their annual donations, which reached $20 million a year in 2015.

On January 12, the Clinton Foundation received more bad news: a WARN notice was filed with the New York Department of Labor. The main office of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City would be closing, laying off 22 employees. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) “offers protection to workers, their families and communities by requiring employers to provide notice 60 days in advance of covered plant closings and covered mass layoffs. This notice must be provided to either affected workers or their representatives (e.g., a labor union); to the State dislocated worker unit; and to the appropriate unit of local government.” The reason for the filing was stated as the “discontinuation of the Clinton Global Initative,” after CGI previously announced layoffs leading up to the general election.

There is no more value in the Clinton Foundation. The Clintons have nothing left to sell now that their 16 years of national power and influence have come to an end. However, that doesn’t mean their nefarious activities have ended, as there appear to be an awful lot of loose ends lying about that require cleaning up now, given the growing number of mysterious deaths and disappearances of individuals connected to the foundation in some way.

The Trump administration’s investigative efforts are likely to prove more than a little illuminating in the next year or two. And despite all the people are worrying about attempts being made on the God-Emperor Ascendant’s life, I would expect that it is the Clintons who have considerably more to fear in that regard. Evil has a habit of callously casting aside its servants who are no longer useful to it.

No apologies

Hater Foz Meadows refuses to apologize to the Jewish people for her despicable insult to Holocaust survivers. So hateful! Incredibly, she sneeringly waves off public demands for an apology as “batshit ridiculous”.

Have you ever heard anything so nakedly anti-semitic? Sad!

And in the meantime, Literally Who isn’t taking Literally Wu’s latest bid for public attention lying down and has come back strong by coming out as… something nameless that appears to be somehow related to ambiguous non-cisgendered cross-dressing special snowflake status.

I’m going to tell you something I’ve been afraid to say for basically ever. And it’s gonna be messy, and it’s gonna go to some dark places (including eating disorders so pls be advised) because I’m barfing my heart out onto the page and hoping I can do it fast enough that I won’t reconsider, or hold back. I can’t say all this without first pausing to say this is only my story, and it’s a privilege that I am able to share it. I want to gently remind people that I’m only trying to speak for me and my own experiences, and in no way does that change or speak to others’ realities. I’m coming out (holy shit typing that made me anxious), so this is just my story.

My entire life I’ve not been a girl or a woman.

Growing up, I’d have hissyfits over being talked to or referred to as a girl. People have had to remind me that they see me as a girl or a woman my entire life, because it doesn’t exist in my head. All that ever has is “this isn’t me”.

When I was 12, I started smoking cigarettes because I thought they’d make my voice lower, and I was tired of hearing a high alien pitch come out of my face. About a year later, I started starving myself because i wanted to look like anything other than a girl, and because I didn’t identify with being a boy either. The closest thing I could find to what looked “right” was the waif thin androgynous body type, and when combined with my hatred of my own body I developed a full on eating disorder that I never told anyone about. At one point, I hovered around 100lbs, despairing that my hips were still wide, my shoulders and chest still broad, and that I’d be an hourglass no matter how much I starved.

I managed to recover, mostly, but the hatred of my own body remained, strong enough that I still can’t objectively see myself in the mirror with any sort of accuracy. I found out recently I’ve been wearing the wrong size of everything, always overestimating, always going baggier, always trying to hide what I’d been so ashamed of.

There is more. Oh, there is so much more than you could ever want to imagine. But it inspires a very important question, which is: how is Literally Who 2 going to respond to this? Let’s face it, it’s going to be hard to top the competition from the other two professional victims, especially when they’ve shown themselves more than willing to match death threat with death threat, and terrified-flight-from-home with terrified-flight-from-home, in the past.

I should think, at a bare minimum, LW2 is going to have to come out as a transgendered male rape victim and run for the U.S. Senate just to stay in the game.

Play fair or there will be no game

Mike Cernovich lays down a reasonable rule for the media:

You received this because you sent in a media inquiry. I generally don’t respond to media for a number of reasons. One is that I get a lot of them. Two is that traditional media doesn’t move the needle for me or the movement as well as social media does. Three is that most of you people won’t even describe me accurately.

If you do not agree to refer to me as an author and filmmaker, then I am not going to talk to you.

I’m an author and documentary filmmaker. Among other people, I interviewed Alan Dershowitz in his home for the feature-length documentary, Silenced. Scott Adams, Dave Rubin, Milo, and many others are in Silenced.

My first book, Gorilla Mindset, has over 735 reviews after 18 months. Maybe you don’t like the subject matter because you do not want to improve your own life, whatever. My second book, on Trump’s rise, already has over 200 reviews and has sold more copies than 99% of books released in 2016.

I am neither “alt-right” nor a men’s rights activist.

Mike Cernovich, author and filmmaker….If you lack the basic journalistic integrity to refer to me as who I am, then there’s nothing to talk about.

This is a good strategy for dealing with the media, as far too few reporters have the basic journalistic integrity to bother getting their facts straight.

And it’s important to force them to do so, because they are the sort of people who won’t hesitate to claim that Christianity, the Alt-Right, and White Nationalism are all one and the same thing.

Author and prolific Tweeter Joyce Carol Oates openly pondered the state of Christianity in America in a post to her Twitter account Thursday afternoon — and believes Christianity is now indistinguishable from white nationalism in many parts of America.

Thus demonstrating that a dedication to social justice and mental retardation are even less distinguishable.

NFL Divisional Round 1

Seahawks-Falcons. Seattle has the pedigree, but Atlanta has been the quietly good team this year, their loss to the Vikings notwithstanding. I’d expect Atlanta to win without too much difficulty.

This is really not good

The clock is rapidly running out on antibiotics. Indeed, it may have already run out.

A US woman has died from an infection that was resistant to all 26 available antibiotics, health officials said this week, raising new concerns about the rise of dangerous superbugs.

The woman, who was in her 70s, died in Nevada in September, and had recently been hospitalized in India with fractured leg bones, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

The cause of death was sepsis, following infection from a rare bacteria known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), which is resistant to all antibiotics available in the United States.

The specific strain of CRE, known as Klebsiella pneumoniae, was isolated from one of her wounds in August.

Tests were negative for the mcr-1 gene — a great concern to health experts because it makes bacteria resistant to the antibiotic of last resort, colistin.

This is genuinely terrifying. Remember, once a species becomes overpopulated, Nature usually figures out a way to cut it back down to size again. Human intelligence doesn’t eliminate that reaction, it merely raises the bar. Immigration and global travel are creating significant health risks, and may even be putting the future of the species in jeopardy.

“The report highlights international travel and treatment overseas as a feature in the introduction of this pan-resistant isolate into the USA,” he said.

Complicating matters is the fact that lower average intelligence across the West means that humanity is less able to address these concerns should they arise. Sooner or later, the Trump administration will have to look very seriously at denying antibiotics to everyone who cannot, or will not, abide by a strictly observed drug-taking regimen. The potential consequences are that serious.

“nearly as good”

Those reviewing A Sea of Skulls should really be a little more careful. Such positive reviews bid fair to cause more than a few SF-SJWs to stroke out. Didact’s Reach reviews A Sea of Skulls and finds it to be rather better than one might expect:

If the critics found ATOB a bit difficult to stomach because it proved to be such an effective demonstration of what a (supposedly) less skilled but (definitely) more disciplined writer could do when compared with GRRM’s declining powers, they are going to very quickly find that A Sea of Skulls will be an even bigger shock to their worldview.

For with this book, Vox Day has not merely matched George R. R. Martin’s fantasy writing skills and output. He has exceeded him, by miles, leaving old Rape Rape wheezing and panting in the dust.

In fact, I am willing to go so far as to argue that, with this book, Vox Day has catapulted himself into the storied and rarefied rank of writers that sits just below The Master himself.

That’s right, I went there. I just said that Vox Day has written a book that is nearly as good as J. R. R. Tolkien’s work.

Not as good. But not terribly far off, either.

From one fantasy fan to another, praise simply does not come any higher than that….

This book is, quite simply, an extraordinary achievement. With it, Vox has separated himself from all of his contemporary rivals and has clearly laid down a marker for everyone else to match- and I personally don’t think anyone will be able to do so for years, maybe decades, to come. What he has written here is far more than merely a great book. It is a masterclass of what high fantasy could actually be.

That’s just an excerpt. Read the whole thing there. Of course, what may be the biggest testimony in favor of the growing consensus that the ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT series has unexpectedly become the best epic fantasy series going is the total silence on the part of those who usually don’t hesitate to speak out critically every time I recommend a book, or, in some cases, exhale. Just as SF/F sites like Black Gate and File 770 inexplicably have nothing to say about many of the very best-selling authors in science fiction, SF authors such as Vaughn Heppner and B.V. Larson, who have sold literal millions of books, they are silent on the subject of a massive epic fantasy saga that some readers now consider to be the best to have appeared in decades.

Now, I am under absolutely no illusion that my work will ever reach the lofty height of Tolkien’s. It can’t. It won’t. Tolkien’s grasp of history, myth, and language are deeper than mine, and the greatness of his work reflects that. The Lord of the Rings is the greatest work of science fiction and fantasy fiction, and, based on my extensive reading of fiction dating back to Homer and the Lady Murasaki, it will remain so for the foreseeable future.

But that does not mean that it cannot be exceeded in various areas, some of which happen to be particular strengths of mine. The martial aspects, the magic systems, the politics, and the socio-sexuality are all elements that can be improved upon. Even the philosophy of evil, in my estimation, is rather on the thin side; who would actually want to serve Sauron? I never found Saruman’s switching sides to be terribly convincing; yes, everyone wants to be on the winning side, but what is the point of being a lieutenant of evil if it requires living in squalor surrounded by orcs?

If nothing else, elf chicks are hotter. So are human chicks, and, arguably, dwarf chicks, for that matter. Is living in a mud pit surrounded by howling, bestial orcs really the way a quasi-immortal wants to spend the rest of his days? I’m just not seeing a credible motivation there.

And let’s not even get started on the whole “fly in on a squadron of eagles and drop the One Ring in Mount Doom” strategy.

Anyhow, it’s very flattering, and encouraging, to see the latest installment in the series has been so well-received. Fans needn’t be concerned that any such praise will go to my head, as to the contrary, it has inspired me to buckle down, grit my teeth, and try to raise my game even more. When even those who openly detest me are willing to admit that AODAL is markedly better than ASOIAF and genuinely merits comparison to The Lord of the Rings, then perhaps I’ll be willing to contemplate a little coasting.

In the meantime, I have about another one million words to write before AODAL will be finished. The only proper verdict at this point is: it’s too soon to tell. I’m barely one-third of the way through the monster. I expect it will be around 1,660,000 words in the end.

They canceled MILO

SJWs at UC-Davis shut down MILO’s event there:

MILO’s event at the University of California, Davis has been cancelled after protesters tore down barricades and engaged in scuffles outside the venue. A camerman for ABC10 was also attacked with hot coffee. ABC-7 reports “violent interactions with protesters.” Video footage shows protesters jumping barricades and throwing them towards police.


Milo Yiannopoulos
My event at UC Davis tonight has been cancelled after violence from left-wing protestors. There are reports of hammers, smashed windows and barricades being torn away. The campus police can’t guarantee anyone’s safety so I’m not being allowed anywhere near the building. Stay safe, everyone.

“We were told by the chief of Davis police that they could not guarantee the safety of the students, the speaker, or the police officers if the event should go ahead. As the organisation hosting the event, we would have been held personally responsible for any harm caused as a result of its taking place. We were therefore forced to cancel the event.”
– Gabrielle McDowell, vice chair of the UC Davis College Republicans.

SJWs are going to SJW. This is precisely why we show them no breathing room, no mercy, and no quarter. None whatsoever.

A Bundle of Holding

This is an excellent deal for role-playing gamers from Autarch. I have Domains at War and backed the Sinister Stone Kickstarter, and it’s all extremely well done. I’m not much of an RPG guy, but I know good game design when I see it, and Alex is very good.

We are pleased to announce that our friends at Bundle of Holding, driving their enemies before them and hearing the lamentations of their spouses and Significant Others, have launched the Adventurer Conqueror King System Bundle, featuring the Adventurer Conqueror King System. The offer is available here:

This discounted offer brings you almost the entire Adventurer Conqueror King System product line as DRM-free .PDF ebooks. For just US$9.95 you get all five titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $40):

  •     Adventurer Conqueror King System (retail price $10): The complete corebook with comprehensive, integrated support for play across all levels of a campaign. (Previously presented in the November 2013 Old School Revival offer.)
  •     ACKS Player’s Companion (retail $10): Add 19 new ACKS character classes, and get under the hood to create your own classes.
  •     Domains at War: Campaigns (retail $7.50): Chart your heroes’ rise to power with these rules for comprehensive military actions among kingdoms.
  •     The Sinister Stone of Sakkara (retail $10): This ideal introductory adventure highlights everything ACKS brings to your gaming table.
  •     Auran Empire Primer (retail $2.50): An introduction to the official ACKS campaign setting, a not-yet-fallen empire in late Antiquity ripe for conquest.

And if you pay more than the threshold price, you’ll level up and also get our entire Bonus Collection with seven more titles (retail value $55):

  •     Dwimmermount (ACKS version, retail $10): Autarch’s colossal 400-page science-fantasy megadungeon and campaign setting. Includes the Dungeon Tracker (retail $10), Map Book (retail $7.50), and Illustration Book (retail $5). (We presented the Labyrinth Lord version of Dwimmermount in the November 2015 OSR +4. The supplements are new to this offer and work with both versions.)
  •     Domains at War: Battles and Troops and Terrain (retail $7.50 each): Conduct the landmark conflicts from your Campaigns actions as easily as you run character combats.
  •     Lairs & Encounters (retail $10): More than 165 ready-to-play monster lairs, plus rules for creating and advancing monsters fit to challenge a kingdom.

And Help Pay For a Cure Disease Spell

Ten percent of your payment (after payment gateway fees) goes to the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation. The UMDF is a charity near and dear to lead designer Alexander Macris (that’s me!) My wife, Amy, was the first player to run a bladedancer in the Auran Empire. She is now so sick with mitochondrial disease that she can’t even play tabletop RPGs with us at all. Her illness has no cure and only limited treatments; the UMDF is trying to change that for her and countless other sufferers around the world.

Click here to get your Bundle of Holding now.