A taste of things to come

John Wright is pleased with Jeremiah’s artwork for the first volume in his Unwithering Realm series, Somewhither, which will be coming out in April. And if you’re interested in supporting an esoteric, but worthwhile project, Castalia House blogger Ken Burnside and Ad Astra game developer needs just $2k more in order to fund his AVID Assistant via Kickstarter.

Speaking of Castalia, we’ll have a new offer going out to the New Release Subscribers next week, but for various reasons I’m not going to bother going into, we will be releasing not just one, but TWO new books the week after that. I’d like to find 10 volunteers to review both of them, so if you’ve got the interest and the intellectual chops to handle either Equality: The Impossible Quest or The Art of War: The History of Military Strategy, both by Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, email me with EQUALITY or WAR in the subject. UPDATE: have all 10 for both books, thank you.

The former is conceived as the third in a conceptual trilogy with Plato’s work on Justice and J.S. Mill’s work on Liberty, whereas the latter features a foreword by none other than Dr. Jerry Pournelle himself, who describes van Creveld’s work as “a necessary supplement to Clausewitz.” It’s a short, but as you can probably imagine from that description, brilliant history, and anyone who has appreciated Mr. Lind’s work is going to find it fascinating and educational. Thanks to Chris Kallini, who did both of the van Creveld covers.

Terry Pratchett: an indictment

Chaos Horizon points out the essential absurdity and historical irrelevance of the Hugo and Nebula Awards:

Pratchett never won a Hugo or Nebula award. Neither awards have ever known what to do with humorous/satirical SFF. Both awards failed to live up to the imagination that Pratchett showed in his best work: it’s easier to celebrate the serious and prestigious than the fantastic. Our field should have done better. Pratchett did receive Nebula nominations late in his career, in 2006 (Going Postal) and 2009 (Making Money). Neither are among his best books. Mort, Guards! Guards!, and Small Gods all would have been worthy winners, but I’d draw your attention to 2003, the year that Robert Sawyer won the Hugo for Hominids. Pratchett published The Night Watch in 2002, a twisty time-travel caper, that would have been an outstanding winner for that year.

I am proud to be able to say that I am among those SFWA members who were responsible for both the 2006 and 2009 Nebula nominations. (I also used to regularly nominate Charles Stross for awards, to little avail, back when he actually deserved them.) The fact that Terry Pratchett wasn’t even being NOMINATED when the likes of Catharine Asaro were WINNING was one of the things that first led me to believe there was something very, very rotten in the state of SF/F awards. Here is the review of Going Postal I posted on this blog in September 2004. In case you’re wondering how the review could have been posted in 2004 while the nomination was in 2006, it was because a) the Nebula schedule was bizarre back then, and b) I received a pre-release review copy of it.

In fairness to the Hugos, Pratchett also received a belated Hugo nomination for Going Postal, but he declined it. It’s hard to believe he didn’t even receive a nomination for his best book, Night Watch, in a year when the likes of Picoverse, The Other Wind, Solitaire, Passage, The Curse of Chalion, The Chronoliths, Cosmonaut Keep, and The Bones of the Earth did.

To be, or not to be, Gamma

Eventually we were bound to start recognizing their patterns, given that they do the same stupid bloody thing every stupid bloody time. Stickwick, who happens to hold a PhD in Astrophysics, points out why there is absolutely no point in responding in a substantive manner to a Gamma male’s questions:

What’s rather remarkable about you is how the fact that you’re so reliably shown to be wrong and/or obtuse doesn’t deter you in the slightest. You’re like one of those inflatable punching clowns that just keeps popping back up no matter how many times you’re knocked down.

This is why I simply go straight to the dismissive rhetoric with these sad sacks now that I sufficiently understand the Gamma mentality. They are all, by their socio-sexual nature, limited to rhetoric. Their defining characteristic is their refusal to accept the truth of a social order that they can not only see, but frequently reaches out and touches them; the Gamma is the True King in his own mind and he redefines defeat as victory every single day.

That is why they “keep popping back up” pretending that they weren’t wrong no matter how many times everyone has seen them intellectually depantsed. They have to cling to the delusion that they are ever-triumphant because they can’t face the depressing ugliness of their own daily reality.


I was quite pleased the other night when I was picking up Ender after practice. The previous practice, he had gotten into a bit of a scuffle with one of his defenders, who got into his face after he’d failed to bail out the defense’s catastrophic mistake, prompting Ender to punch him in the face when he wouldn’t back off. Fortunately, they finally have a good coach, who chewed out the entire defense for being lazy, then told off the defender while he had Ender run a few laps as punishment.

I was curious when I saw the defender standing in the path where Ender would be exiting the clubhouse. Having gotten into it two days before, I wondered how they would they react. Would they pretend not to see each other, be distantly polite, or behave normally? But instead, when Ender came out I saw them exchange the thumbs-back hand-clasp thing and nod, which of course is male teamspeak for mutual acceptance. That was good, because it told me that whatever he may turn out to be, it isn’t going to be a passive-aggressive, self-delusional Gamma male.

Meanwhile, this exchange with another Gamma was as amusing as it was illustrative.

VD: (cites article in which scientists admit problems with rectifying data with evolutionary theory)

Gamma: So what’s the alternative to evolution? To instead believe in the Hebrew book of fairy tales called The Bible and honestly believe the world is only 6000 years old and humans and dinosaurs co-existed on Earth like in The Flintstones? You’ll have to do better than that. That just sounds like believing in a fairy tale someone made up. And if science is so phony next time you need to fix a broken bone or get an operation, just try praying real hard instead, see how far that gets you.

VD: Duck and change the subject. That’s certainly new. And convincing! Why pray when we can simply fix it by evolving it through natural selection? Because that’s science too, right?

[Notice how when I don’t bite on the pseudo-dialectic by taking it seriously but simply mock it, the Gamma drops the
passive-aggression and shifts right into the full rhetorical attack
mode. There isn’t even any pretense of dialectic anymore, just a desperate throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall attempt to cause feelbad.]

Gamma: Because you can’t just sit and evolve. That would be as futile as praying for a deity to fix your broken bone magically or cure you of your illness that required an operation. Said deity would not answer. Plus evolution takes a very, very long time. The average human being only lives to around 80. You’d need medical attention pretty quick if you had a broken bone or you needed a life saving operation. Just praying to got to correct either would get you nowhere.

Off topic, but I think Vox Day really is jealous of a Gamma like John Scalzi. Which is why he keeps writing about him. He can’t understand why such a nerd can sell so many more books than a so-called real man with a black belt (or whatever) in martial arts like he is.

Vox Day doesn’t really act like a Christian either to be honest. Jesus (if he existed) loved everyone. Even non-believers. Jesus wouldn’t be for racial segregation voluntary or not. Even if Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream has failed. Vox never used to write about all this race themed stuff. Not until Obama was elected and then re-elected. I think Obama’s re-election really knocked the wind out of his sails. And that’s part of why he gave up the WorldNetDaily column. I think the demographic for his blog has changed. It used to be a younger crowd. Now it feels like the average age is 50 plus. A lot of old get of my lawn type retirees. One more thing, being a world class cruelty artist may be entertaining for readers, but my guess is the Christian God and Christ (if either exists) finds that level of cruelty in human beings to be a pretty serious sin. 

This is hilarious. Let’s count the feeble attempts to cause feelbad. 1) jealous, 2) false Christian, 3) upset by Obama’s re-election, 4) readership is old and past it, 5) offending a God in whom the Gamma doesn’t even believe. With all due respect, I’ve had people publicly calling me every name in the book FOR 14 YEARS now. Do you really think you’re going to be the one who has finally come up with the magic word that will crack my Olympian indifference to your opinion?

I was curious about the blog demographics, however. It turns out that the three most distinctive characteristics of the VP readership are that they are a) educated, b) male, and c) wealthy, in that order. As for age, the blog is followed heavily in all age groups from 25-64, with 45-54 being the strongest and under-18s being the most highly underrepresented. This makes sense, as under-18s are the least-educated, least-wealthy group out there. And, of course, I am in the 45-54 educated wealthy male group myself.

It’s not so much “get off my lawn” as “please be advised that you will now be escorted from the premises of our country club”.

Never bother to engage in dialectic with a Gamma male. It serves no purpose, they literally don’t hear what you’re saying. To them, arguing is a competition in causing feelbad. So relentlessly mock them and target their insecurities, and pay no attention whatsoever to their pseudo-dialectical bait. It isn’t honestly offered.

UPDATE: This discussion has helped me see a little deeper into the psychology and I think it’s given me a glimpse into the core source of the Gamma delusion. The Gamma believes that if he admits to the truth of his own feelings about himself, he will lose.

Evolution and the problem of time

I always find it amusing when someone who has credentials in a subject, but is at a distinct disadvantage in IQ terms tries to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. You may recall that over the years, I have repeatedly asked various evolutionary True Believers a very simple and straightforward time-based question, to which there absolutely must be an answer, and they not only have been unable to answer it, but frequently tried to deny it was either a) relevant or b) possible, thereby demonstrating that they don’t understand ANYTHING about their own faux-scientific faith. But the speed of evolution, and of the underlying mutations, is absolutely central to understanding the theory, as well as determining whether it is total nonsense or not:

Mathematicians keep refining π even though they know it to more than 12 trillion digits; physicists beat themselves up because they cannot pin down the gravitational constant beyond three significant figures. Geneticists, by contrast, are having trouble deciding between one measure of how fast human DNA mutates and another that is half that rate.

The rate is key to calibrating the ‘molecular clock’ that puts DNA-based dates on events in evolutionary history. So at an intimate meeting in Leipzig, Germany, on 25–27 February, a dozen speakers puzzled over why calculations of the rate at which sequence changes pop up in human DNA have been so much lower in recent years than previously. They also pondered why the rate seems to fluctuate over time. The meeting drew not only evolutionary geneticists, but also researchers with an interest in cancer and reproductive biology — fields in which mutations have a central role.

“Mutation is ultimately the source of all heritable diseases and all biological adaptations, so understanding the rate at which mutations evolve is a fundamental question,” says Molly Przeworski, a population geneticist at Columbia University in New York City who attended the Human Mutation Rate Meeting….

A slower molecular clock worked well to harmonize genetic and
archaeological estimates for dates of key events in human evolution,
such as migrations out of Africa and around the rest of the world.
But calculations using the slow clock gave nonsensical results when
extended further back in time — positing, for example, that the most
recent common ancestor of apes and monkeys could have encountered
dinosaurs. Reluctant to abandon the older numbers completely, many
researchers have started hedging their bets in papers, presenting
multiple dates for evolutionary events depending on whether mutation is
assumed to be fast, slow or somewhere in between.

You know you’re dealing with QUALITY science when scientists start substituting variables for concrete numbers depending upon what they want the results to be. Here is the money quote: “The fact that the clock is so uncertain is very problematic for us,” he
says. “It means that the dates we get out of genetics are really quite
embarrassingly bad and uncertain.”

As I have repeatedly predicted, genuine genetic science is eventually going to kill evolution by natural selection deader than phlogiston or the Flat Earth theory.

RIP Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett is dead at 66:

British fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett has died aged 66 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, his publisher said today.He sold more than 85 million books worldwide in 37 languages, but also waged a very public struggle with Alzheimer’s disease in recent years – and was a vocal campaigner of the right to die.

The author is best known for his satirical fantasy novels set in Discworld, a flat planet resting on the back of four elephants, themselves perched on the back of a vast turtle moving through space.

After avoiding them for years, I eventually came to enjoy many of Mr. Pratchett’s books and consider him to have been rather underrated as a writer. I hope, for the sake of his literary legacy, that his death will be sufficient to prevent him from writing any more books.

The ghosts of the machine are pro-Puppy

This strikes me as not only amusing, but a propitious omen:

I just logged into Sasquan’s website to make Hugo nominations, and when I first opened my ballot, all the slots were already filled in. It seemed to be entirely with the Sad Puppies slate. It’s my first time nominating, is this kind of thing usual? And if so, why the hell?

I mean, I changed them all, but why were they there?

I’m not entirely sure it was the Sad Puppies party ticket, but Vox Day appeared a surprising number of times.

I don’t know why it should surprise anyone that an Internet Superintelligence should have machine intelligence friends. In any event, these deep mysteries of the cybernetic age aside, it’s been interesting to see some of the predictions concerning the Hugo nominations, both public and private. Chaos Horizon is among those expecting SP/RP to land two Best Novel nominees, Monster Hunter: Nemesis and Skin Game:

3. Monster Hunter Nemesis, Larry Correia: Correia finished 3rd in the 2014 Hugo nominations, with only Leckie and Gaiman placing above him (Gaiman declined the nom). That put him very safely in the field, and the mathematics are in Correia’s favor for this year. While Monster Hunter Nemesis is a slightly odd choice for the Hugos, being 5th in a series and urban fantasy to boot, it’s hard to imagine Correia’s supporters abandoning him en-masse in just one year. Despite the vigor of his campaign, Correia doesn’t haven’t the broad support necessary to win a Hugo.

5. Skin Game, Jim Butcher: Skin Game was part of the “Sad Puppy 3″ slate, but Butcher’s appeal extends well beyond that block of voters. While Butcher has never gotten much Hugo love in the past, he is one of the most popular writers working in the urban fantasy field, and his Henry Dresden novels have been consistently well-liked and well-loved by fans. Even WorldCon voters who don’t agree with the Sad Puppy 3 argument may look at the list, see Butcher, and think, Why not? If Correia can make the slate, so too can Butcher—and Butcher might be even more popular in Sad Puppy realm than Correia. On the negative, this is #14 in a series, and that’s a tough sell to new readers. I’ll be fascinated to see how the vote turns out on this one.

I tend to think he’s discounting Nebula-nominated The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, which I expect will replace either the Addison or the Leckie book on the list of finalists. My suspicion, and it is only that, is that Sad Puppies is going to generally outperform what appears to be the consensus expectations of two nominees per category. Now, I could be entirely wrong and perhaps there is a 650-strong stealth SJW slate that will lock out the Puppies entirely across the board, but I don’t see many signs of that having been successfully organized.

Chaos Horizons also looked the number of expected nominations and predicted the overall performance of Sad Puppies:

In an earlier post, I estimated the total nomination ballots for this year to be around 2350 (that’s pure guesswork, sadly). 330/2350 = 14.0%. Either way, the model gets us in the same ball park: Sad Puppies 3 is likely, at the top end, to account for between 10% and 15% of the 2015 Hugo nominating vote. For good or bad, that will be enough to put the top Sad Puppy 3 texts into the Hugo slate.

2. The data shows that the Sad Puppy 2 campaign fell off fairly fast from the most popular authors like Correia to less popular authors like Toregersen (60% of Correia’s total) and Hoyt (50% of Correia’s total) to Vox Day (33% of Correia’s total). Torgersen and Vox Day made the final slate based on the relatively weakness of the Novella and Novelette categories. While I don’t track categories like Novella, Novelette, or Short Story on Chaos Horizon (there’s not enough data, and I don’t know the field well enough), I expect a similar drop-off to occur this year. If you want to assess the impact of the whole Sad Puppy 3 slate, think about which authors are as popular as Correia and which aren’t.

If we put those two pieces of data together, we get my “Hugo Campaign Model”:

1. A Hugo campaign like “Sad Puppies 3″ will probably account for 10-15% of the 2015 nominating vote.
2. The “Sad Puppies 3″ slate will fall off quickly based on the popularity of the involved authors. 

I don’t think Chaos Horizon is correct about the percentage, however, for two reasons. First, he probably isn’t aware that the Dread Ilk did not get involved until AFTER the nominations were closed. So he’s probably missing about 120 votes right there. Furthermore, we know that an unknown number of Dread Ilk, and an equally unknown number of new Sad Puppies, got involved this year. So, my guess is that his 330 estimate should be at least 500 for the combined Puppies and could be even higher. If we assume his 2,350 estimate is correct, and I find his reasoning to be perfectly plausible there, then the Puppies will represent between 20 and 25 percent of the 2015 nominating vote.

(I note, with some amusement, that the combined Puppy vote will likely exceed the TOTAL Hugo nominating vote for any year prior to 2009. Keep that in mind when anyone tries to claim our votes are somehow unrepresentative, illegitimate, or unfair.)

Second, Chaos Horizon has no reason to understand that the Dread Ilk are far more intelligent, focused, and disciplined than the average readership. But you are, and therefore at least the Rabid Puppies element of the slate is unlikely to fall off quickly on the basis of popularity as it did last year.

Diversity = military occupation

France occupies itself:

As the threat of attacks by Islamist extremists remains high in France, President Francois Hollande has decided to continue the deployment of 10,000 troops on the streets across the country.

“The threat of terrorist attack against our country remains high. The head of state has decided to maintain the level of the army on the national territory at 10,000 troops in support of security forces from the Interior Ministry,” Hollande’s office said in a statement after a meeting of senior ministers, AFP reported.

A total of 7,000 troops will be monitoring and protecting religious buildings that are “particularly threatened,” the statement added. Among other sites that are being patrolled by the troops are stations, media buildings and various other possible targets for terrorists. The move comes almost two months after deadly attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine’s headquarters and a kosher shop in Paris left 17 people dead.

At some point, someone in France is going to realize that if you’re going to pay for 10,000 troops to militarily occupy your own nation, it would be considerably more effective to use all those troops to repatriate the group of people responsible for making the occupation necessary.

And that’s assuming they lean towards the more civilized option, which has historically not always been the case in France.

We are fighting back

Reggie at Reaxxion explains how SJWs are putting women out of work.

 PAX banned booth babes from their events and they are just one of many events including E3 to start banning booth babes. This is an excerpt of what PAX had to say on their booth babe policy:

PAX has a strict ‘no booth babe’ policy with the purpose of creating an environment where everyone can feel comfortable and welcome, and the focus is on games, not hired booth staff.

Booth babes are defined as staff of ANY gender used by exhibitors to promote their products at PAX by using overtly sexual or suggestive methods. Partial nudity, the aggressive display of cleavage and the navel, and shorts/skirts higher than 4” above the knee are not allowed. If for any reason an exhibit and/or its contents are deemed objectionable to PAX management, the exhibitor will be asked to alter the attire of its staff.

Cosplayed characters that are playable in-game are an exception to this rule (within reason), and exhibitors must obtain permission from show management prior to the show.

As Reggie points out, cosplayers shouldn’t be breathing a sigh of relief, because it’s obvious they are next. Hot women make not-hot women uncomfortable, therefore they must be banned.  As Game Dev newsletter subscribers already know, Alpenwolf has bravely responded to this attack on women by adding a female character to First Sword and making her the face of the game.

About more in the near future. “Morwyn Shadowsong” is already scheduled to be featured in a photoshoot for a popular men’s site and will also be appearing in miniature, cartoon, and 3D formats. She will also be the protagonist of a novella, The Gladiator’s Song, which will be published later this year by Castalia House.

Relativists regret consequences of relativism

It is becoming increasingly obvious that abandoning traditional Christian moral values comes at a very heavy societal cost. Unfortunately, even those who belatedly recognize this can’t quite bring themselves to do the obvious and call for a return to the traditional white Christian civilization of Western Christendom:

The health of society is primarily determined by the habits and virtues of its citizens. In many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father. There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically.

Reintroducing norms will require, first, a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed because of people with bad values. They were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.

Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?

Next it will require holding everybody responsible. America is obviously not a country in which the less educated are behaving irresponsibly and the more educated are beacons of virtue. America is a country in which privileged people suffer from their own characteristic forms of self-indulgence: the tendency to self-segregate, the comprehensive failures of leadership in government and industry. Social norms need repair up and down the scale, universally, together and all at once.

There is no easy way out. Humanity is not going to magically, or rationally, invent a better moral system than those that a) were handed down from on high, or if you prefer, b) evolved through trial-and-error. In light of the failure of secularism and multiculturalism, the nations of the West are going to embrace some past moral structure, absolutist judgments and all.

The only question is if it will be pagan or Christian. And the former is considerably less pretty than its historically ignorant proponents understand.

Interview with a legend

Johnny Wilson, the former editor-in-chief of Computer Gaming World, is one of my all-time favorite people in the game industry and one of the individuals I most respect on the planet. He’s written one very good book with Rusel DeMaria on the history of the industry, and I’m hoping to get another one out of him for Castalia House.

Like a lot of the old school game industry people, Johnny is more than a one-trick pony; in addition to being a professor at DePaul University, he’s also a theologian and a pastor. The whole Gamasutra interview from 2012 is fascinating, but in light of #GamerGate, I found these two answers to be particularly prescient.

Was there any moment that made you realize game journalism had finally reached the main stream?

Considering the shoddy state of mainstream journalism today (even some once-great newspapers are pure sell-outs), I guess we reached that bottom rung level a long time ago. I know that when I was editor, I had definite ideals of serving the reader, avoiding conflict-of-interest, and getting behind the corporate facades and into the real stories. The truth is that I don’t know of any modern publications—analog or digital—that have those ideals.

Do you think game reviews with percentages and stars somehow cheapened game journalism?

No, I think the desire to get the “first” coverage cheapened game journalism. In the pen and paper world, we used to talk about “shrink-wrap” reviews. I know that some of the early pioneers in the hobby game magazines would talk about popping the shrink-wrap, looking at the components, reading the rules, and writing the review without even pushing pieces around. My feeling was that European publications, because they had a more competitive environment (and efficient distribution system), rushed reviews to press. That doesn’t really serve the reader at all.

My argument with, for example, PC Gamer’s percentage system wasn’t that they used percentages, it was that an astute reader would notice that the magazine (at least, during the Gary Witta era) always had some sacrificial lamb of a product that they rated in low percentage ratings. But, if you looked at those games, a lot of them were never released in the U.S. and certainly weren’t advertisers in that publication. At CGW, we didn’t have enough editorial space to deal with games that weren’t going to be released in the U.S. So, we wouldn’t even have touched those games. On the other hand, there were times that lousy games we might have been tempted to ignore were actually advertised in our publication. If they were advertised, I felt an obligation to review them. And I had more than one advertiser yell at me that I shouldn’t treat them that way after what they had spent. I shrugged my shoulders on one occasion and said, “Ironically, I probably wouldn’t even have assigned the review if you weren’t trying to get my readers’ attention.”

But, did our star ratings cheapen our review work? No. If anything, the stars sharpened our efforts. The reviewers suggested a number of stars and the editor covering that genre was expected to defend that star rating in the general editorial [OK, “Star Chamber”] meeting where we debated the ratings. The meeting often required a half-day or more of heated discussions before we approved those reviews to go to press. We didn’t discuss the reviews among ourselves as much before the star ratings were implemented. To be honest, I resisted the star ratings for as long as possible. I wanted the readers to READ the reviews. But, the bottom line is that I just kept getting hammered by readers that we NEVER gave bad reviews when I thought it was clear that we gave bad reviews. I eventually realized that our readership was becoming younger and more casual and, as a result, we had to spell out what we really thought.

The world wide web was the death of game journalism. There simply isn’t any reliable metric to determine which site is really reliable and which journalists are legitimately trying to do their work and which are merely “fan boys” getting their dopamine fix by slamming people and using “tabloid” style headlines. It always makes me nervous when I read reviews on the web because I don’t feel like I can trust anyone to have played the game all the way through.

Go read the reviews from the older CGW issues sometime. The difference between the level of expertise and the depth of knowledge possessed by the writers then versus the writers of today is astonishing. The dirty little secret of the SJWs in game journalism today is that they don’t actually know very much about games, which is why they always lean towards using their nominal game reviews and articles as a platform for non-gaming issues.

I wrote for both Electronic Entertainment and Computer Gaming World, and writing for the latter was always rigorous. Chris Lombardi not only sent my first review back to me for re-writing, but rejected an article on games as the realization of the Wagnerian concept of Total Art that later appeared in a BenBella SmartPop book. The most notable thing CGW had that most modern game sites lack was integrity.