Continental warming

Temperatures continue to rise in Europe:

[T]he relentless stream of migrants to Europe — propelled by the war in
Syria and turmoil across the Middle East and the Horn of Africa — has
combined with economic troubles and rising fear of Islamic radicalism to
fuel a backlash against immigrants, directed most viciously at Muslims.

The
simmering resentments and suspicions have driven debates across Europe
about tighter controls on immigration. Worries about immigration have
helped buoy right-wing parties in Britain, Denmark, France and Hungary.
German officials recorded more than 70 attacks against mosques from 2012
to 2014, including an arson, and the police in Britain have recorded an
increase in hate crimes against Muslims. There are few places where the
turn against immigrants is more surprising than Sweden, where a solid
core of citizens still supports the 65-year-old open door policy toward
immigrants facing hardship that has long earned international respect
for the country….

Opposition
to the rising numbers is growing. The far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden
Democrats had their best showing ever — nearly 13 percent of votes — in
elections in September. The
entry of the Sweden Democrats to parliament in 2010 had already opened
the door for a previously unthinkable discussion about turning back the
country’s policy of taking in foreigners on humanitarian grounds and
granting them access to the country’s generous welfare system.

Adrian
Groglopo, a professor of social science at the University of
Gothenburg, has studied discrimination in Sweden over the past decade.
He said that Sweden has long been a racially segregated country where
many immigrants live in ghettos and struggle to find jobs, but that the
success of the Sweden Democrats has made racism more socially
acceptable.

By the time the current generation of young people take power, “racism” (or as it is more properly described, nationalism) will not only be socially acceptable, it will be legally mandated. Merkel and her merry band of multiculturalists are on their way out, and once the nationalists gain power everywhere from Greece to Germany, from Serbia to Sweden, the tides will reverse in a manner that will surprise nearly everyone who knows nothing of history and its cycles.

Note this growing movement in Germany, which has already surpassed the peak popularity of the Tea Party: One German in eight would join an anti-Muslim march if a rapidly-growing
protest movement organized one in their home towns, according to an
opinion poll published on Thursday.

Immigration in small numbers by those who fully integrate in every way, including language and religion, is beneficial to a nation. But that is very different than mass migration, which is not merely detrimental to a nation, it is materially worse than war. And multi-ethnic societies always collapse, usually in violence.

Gun control by any other name

Would still stink of totalitarianism. Don’t fall for the rebranding of gun control as “gun safety”:

The gun control movement, blocked in Congress and facing mounting losses in federal elections, is tweaking its name, refining its goals and using the same-sex marriage movement as a model to take the fight to voters on the state level.

After a victory in November on a Washington State ballot measure that will require broader background checks on gun buyers, groups that promote gun regulations have turned away from Washington and the political races that have been largely futile. Instead, they are turning their attention — and their growing wallets — to other states that allow ballot measures.

An initiative seeking stricter background checks for certain purchasers has already qualified for the 2016 ballot in Nevada, where such a law was passed last year by the Legislature then vetoed by the governor. Advocates of gun safety — the term many now use instead of “gun control” — are seeking lines on ballots in Arizona, Maine and Oregon as well.

It’s always pure deceitful rhetoric with the fucking rabbits. Always. The fact that they’ve been roundly defeated for two decades just means that they’ll rebrand, lie, and try again.

And observe that giving their inch only encourages them to immediately go after the mile.

In Washington, those who pushed the ballot measure through say they will begin a campaign to get the State Legislature to pass measures to keep guns from those with mental illnesses, children and people with a record of domestic violence.

Never give them an inch. Never compromise. Never moderate. And always punch back twice as hard.

The Orwellian imperative

I was thinking about why the SJWs make such a mission of celebrating sexual aberration as normal and elevate the acceptance of those who are deluded about their sexual identity as secular saints as a moral imperative.

In addition to the way in which it reveals the intrinsic illogic of the SJW Left – on Alpha Game, I observed that the logical Left’s position would be that it was a tragedy Joshua had to kill himself rather than permitting someone to legally kill him – it occurs to me that their linguistic demands are another example of their Orwellian imperative.

By weakening the independence and strength of individuals’ minds and forcing them to live in a constant state of propaganda-induced fear, the Party is able to force its subjects to accept anything it decrees, even if it is entirely illogical—for instance, the Ministry of Peace is in charge of waging war, the Ministry of Love is in charge of political torture, and the Ministry of Truth is in charge of doctoring history books to reflect the Party’s ideology.

That the national slogan of Oceania is equally contradictory is an important testament to the power of the Party’s mass campaign of psychological control. In theory, the Party is able to maintain that “War Is Peace” because having a common enemy keeps the people of Oceania united. “Freedom Is Slavery” because, according to the Party, the man who is independent is doomed to fail. By the same token, “Slavery Is Freedom,” because the man subjected to the collective will is free from danger and want. “Ignorance Is Strength” because the inability of the people to recognize these contradictions cements the power of the authoritarian regime.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

In other words, if you are willing to call a HE a SHE, if you are willing to address Joshua as Leelah, you are willing to pretend that XY is XX or XX is XY, you are signaling your intellectual slavishness and that you will be willing to declare that WAR is PEACE, FREEDOM is SLAVERY, and 2+2=5 upon demand.

Of course, to paraphrase one AG reader’s observation, if Joshua Alcorn had really been a woman, he would have taken 30 Advil in a failed suicide attempt.

An interview with John C. Wright

A Castalia House blogger interviews the leading Castalia House author at Castalia House:

Q: Your conversion story from atheism to Christianity is remarkable.  Some critics have been surprised to discover which of your books were written as a Christian, and which were written as an atheist.  You have said that in each case you simply followed the internal logic of the story to its conclusion.  How much has your faith influenced your fiction, if at all?

A: This is a very difficult question, because my firm resolution when first I converted was to simply tell stories to entertain.

I am often annoyed by stories that preach, even when they preach a sermon with which I wholly agree, such as Philip Pullman’s THE GOLDEN COMPASS. I was an atheist when I read it, a full-throat anti-Christian zealous in my love of godlessness, and even I could not stand the obtrusive excrescence of the preaching in that miserable book.

Now that I am in the other camp of the endless war between light and darkness, I confess I am still nonplussed and unamused by preaching disguised as entertainment, whether it supports my side or not. The idea of ‘Christian entertainment’ is a sound one, as long as it is entertaining as well as being Christian. There is an odor of self satisfied smugness and piety which is as repellant as the musk of a skunk clinging to much Christian entries into the literary world, which one never finds in older works, such as Milton or Dante, and never in the works of masters even in so humble as genre as science fiction. I challenge anyone to find anything nakedly and blandly pious or preachy in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, R.A. Lafferty, Gene Wolfe or Tim Powers, but there is clearly a spiritual dimension to all their works.

So I vowed a great vow never to let my personal feelings creep into my books, but merely to tell a tale for the sake of the tale, keeping faith with my readers. I am not their teacher, nor their preacher, nor their father confessor, and I have no duty to instruct them, and no qualifications to do so, no more than the jester in a King’s court has the authority to criticize the laws and policies of the King. My customers are my kings, and my job is to do pratfalls and take pies to the face to amuse them.

In the space of a single hour my great vow was overthrown when a reader, practically in tears, so deeply and thoughtfully praised the vision of spiritual reality presented in one of my short stories, the wholesomeness of the moral atmosphere portrayed there, that the reader likened it to a man trapped on some alien world of chlorine gas and sulfurous clouds being allowed to step on the fair, green fields of Earth for a single breath of wholesome, springtime air.

The reader was talking about my Christian faith, and the strength and firmness and clarity it lent to my writing. If I can wax lyrical about Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage, as I did in THE GOLDEN AGE, then surely I can wax lyrical about truth, virtue, and beauty.

The king is sad, and the jester needs to bring him comfort, for I know tales of a country where these sad things do not reign, but a king kindlier and mightier than any mortal king. As a jester, I owe it to my kings here on Earth and the King of Kings in heaven not to hide or waste my talents.

You’ll definitely want to read the whole thing. And afterwards, if you happen to find yourself still failing to be in possession of excellent books by the interviewee such as THE GOLDEN AGE, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM, and THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS, I find it impossible to imagine that you will not want to swiftly rectify the situation.

It’s an excellent interview with a fascinating author. Scooter did an excellent job of formulating much deeper questions than one generally sees in the SF genre, in addition to demonstrating that he was actually very familiar with the author’s material.

Of rabbit fear and hate

Interesting though it is, I’m not entirely convinced by this particular aspect of AC’s theory myself:

In one post though, [John C. Wright] pointed out that he felt the work here was incomplete, because it didn’t deal with the spiritual. He is correct, of course. If you meet pure evil, face to face, you will realize that there is clearly something much deeper than a mere mechanism, which happens to produce evil as a byproduct of some other purpose. As one examines evil up close, the only answer which really makes sense is that the evil are soldiers, with a mission, serving some authority. They will sacrifice their own interests, destroy their own lives, and fall on their own swords, in a genuinely selfless pursuit of their evil purposes. They will even do evil when it doesn’t matter, and when there is no sense to it. Their evil mechanism is so self-sacrificial that it seems the type of thing which nature would eliminate over time. He is right about the spiritual lacking here, and I encourage others to not mistake its absence here for some endorsement of a non-spiritual world model.

One part of his response I take issue with however, is his assertion that the rabbits hate him because he exposes them to truth. A proper explanation of this touches on the spiritual, in part because a full understanding of the rabbit’s hate offers a window into the same hatred Satan holds for the good.

In short, the rabbits do not so much hate John, as they hold him in contempt. Hate is more of a visceral rejection of some moral or emotional aspect of something. Hate can be applied to anything – you can hate a beggar or hate a King. Contempt carries with it a subtle air of rejecting something due to inferiority or weakness. Hate is a raw emotion that you express without regard to your enemy’s status. Contempt is reserved, solely for the weak, whom you can afford to hold in contempt, and it is most often expressed by cowards who only attack their lessers, and who hold little in regard beyond their own immediate safety.

Rabbits have contempt for John because he is kind, rational, and compassionate, and they see that all as weakness. The rabbits dislike John because he is a man who challenges the falsehoods they need to quiet their amygdala. However it is only because his goodness renders him harmless, that this dislike manifests as contempt. The real source of the rabbit’s hatred of John is his tolerance of them – the very quality they claim so ardently to espouse and champion, but which they only use to infiltrate and corrupt any organization too tolerant to reject them.

The reason I’m not sure about this is that I find it very difficult to believe that I am not actually hated by the Pinkshirts. First, because I get a definite anger, fear, and hatred vibe from most of them, second, because I find it very difficult to believe that they sense any inferiority or weakness on my part.

I could be wrong, but I certainly don’t feel either of those things, particularly not with regards to the flabby, overweight, evolutionary dead-ends who have never seen the inside of a weight room nor tested themselves in any form of combat, and flee from the mere suggestion of seeing their intellectual skills tested by debate with me or other formidable figures of the not-rabbit Right.

Then again, the fact that I am patient and a counterpuncher by both training and inclination has caused people to misread me before, both online and in real life. My impression has tended to be that the rabbits hate me less because I disagree with them than because I remind them of the jocks they used to fear, envy, and hate back in junior high and high school. We are dealing with fairly serious cases of arrested development here, and back in the day, more than one girl told my friends and me that we reminded her of the bad guys in every 80’s movie ever, right down to the Porsches, Triumphs, and Jaguars. And in real life the athletes and arrogant rich boys with cars always get the girl, which tends to foster a certain lasting resentment among the would-be white-knighting gamma males of the world.

But regardless, there is one thing concerning which AC is indubitably right, and that is that their father is the Devil. They don’t merely hate the truth, they love lies, seemingly for their own sake. Every SJW I’ve met not only lies, but lies effortlessly, and without any shame whatsoever after being caught in a lie. And perhaps that is where the aspect of contempt that AC mentions comes in; like Nietzsche and the Nazis, the rabbits do not understand honor and they find those who are not willing to embrace every possible tactic and weapon to be weak and possessed of insufficient will-to-power compared to the progressive Ubermensch they consider themselves to be.

Of course, it’s a little difficult to put his hypothesis to the scientific test. I mean, what are we supposed to do, have Tom Kratman crucify John Scalzi on his lawn, then poll the rabbits to see if his popularity has risen among the science fiction left?

Comment champions

One of Blogger’s flaws is that its comment management tools are crude to the point of being nonexistent. So, as part of Operation Yama, our elite team of trollhunters has created a tool that permits the datamining of Blogger comments in order to accurately document the full extent of the cyberstalking that has taken place here. In addition to providing us with a complete list of his trespasses, the tool also helped us identify two of Yama’s identities that had previously gone undocumented.

Interestingly enough, it’s also allowed us to see who left the most comments here in 2014. The winner, with over 3,000, was Nate. The top seven are as follows:

  1. Nate
  2. Josh
  3. Markku
  4. Bob K. Mando
  5. Tom Kratman
  6. James Dixon
  7. Jack Amok

The updated cyberstalker list:

Yamamanama, Dan Picaro, Andthestarshine, Kasa the Wicked, Nikola,
Alauda, Arachnothera, Beardsley McTurbanhead, Chokley Carmichael,
Clamps, Comrade Questions, Daphis, Daphnis, Freddy Foreshadowing,
Luscinia, Luscinia Hafez, Starshine, Sunlight, Will, Will leFey, Yama,
Yama the Space Fish, Count Bullets-ula, Lilacanddatura, Phoenixwing667, Darkprophet667, Ciconia, inimbe karu ava, and @Pure, Impure.

    Reading List 2014
    Of the 71 books I read this year, the one I enjoyed most was John C. Wright’s The Golden Age, followed by his Awake in the Night Land and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. The
     worst book I read this year was, without question, Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory,
     which was so repulsive that it made me feel that it would serve very well as Exhibit A in any argument being made for book-burning and the licensing and registration of authors. The
     most disappointing book was William Gibson’s The Peripheral. It was all right, but it was disappointing to see the normally astute Gibson relying upon tired cliches and conventional tropes.
    On the non-fiction side, I read three excellent books this year, starting with An Essay on Economic Theory by Richard Cantillon. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami is a very interesting read for any writer and The Transformation of War by Martin van Creveld is fully worthy of its place in the 4GW Canon. On the downside, regulars will recall that I took apart Peter Boghossian’s inept A Manual for Creating Atheists in no little detail, while the shamefully deceitful Fourth-Generation Warfare and Other Myths by Antulio Echevarria left me embarrassed for the writer’s assault on his own integrity and reputation.
    Keep in mind these ratings are not necessarily statements about a book’s
     significance or its literary quality, they are merely casual observations of my personal tastes and how much I
     happened to enjoy reading the book at the time. A five-star book is one that I recommend without reservations.
    FIVE STARS
    An Essay on Economic Theory, Richard Cantillon
     The Golden Age, John C. Wright
     The Golden Transcendence, John C. Wright 
     Awake in the Night Land, John C. Wright
     Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
     Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
     Narcissus and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse 
     The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe
     The Transformation of War, Martin van Creveld 
     What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
     One Bright Star to Guide Them, John C. Wright 
     Transhuman and Subhuman, John C. Wright
    FOUR STARS 
    The Programmed Man, Jeff and Jean Sutton
     The Phoenix Exultant, John C. Wright 
     The Business, Iain Banks
     Monster Hunter Nemesis, Larry Correia
     The Claw of the Conciliator, Gene Wolfe 
     His Master’s Voice, Stanislau Lem
     The Elephant Vanishes and Other Stories, Haruki Murakami
     Sci Phi Journal 1, Jason Rennie
     Hear the Wind Sing, Haruki Murakami
     The Land of Blood and Honey, Martin van Creveld 
     First on the Moon, Jeff Sutton
     City Beyond Time, John C. Wright
     A Sword Into Darkness, Thomas Mays 
     World Order, Henry Kissinger
    THREE STARS
    A Troublesome Inheritance, Nicholas Wade
     Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin 
     Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings
     The Crusades, Thomas Asbridge 
     Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, Haruki Murakami
     The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami 
     Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami
     Confessions of Felix Krull, Thomas Mann 
     Strong Poison, Dorothy Sayers 
     On Basilisk Station, David Weber
     Count to a Trillion, John C. Wright
     The Hermetic Millennia, John C. Wright 
     The Uplift War, David Brin
     Startide Rising, David Brin 
     The Crow Road, Iain Banks
     By Its Cover, Donna Leon
     Apollo at Go, Jeff Sutton 
     The Peripheral, William Gibson
     Sci Phi Journal 2, Jason Rennie 
     Sci Phi Journal 3, Jason Rennie
     Skin Game, Jim Butcher
     The Citadel of the Autarch, Gene Wolfe 
     The Sword of the Lictor, Gene Wolfe
     Scotland’s Jesus, Frankie Boyle
    TWO STARS 
    Whose Body?, Dorothy Sayers 
     A Short, Victorious War, David Weber
     Prospero Lost, L. Jagi Lamplighter 
     The Starship Titanic, Douglas Adams and Terry Jones
     The World at War, Richard Holmes 
     Walking on Glass, Iain Banks
     Espedair Street, Iain Banks  
     Space Viking, H. Beam Piper
     Winner Take All, Simon Green
     The Man with the Golden Torc, Simon Green
     Demons are Forever, Simon Green
     The God Killer, Simon Green
     Wolf in the Fold, Simon Green
     The Rhesus Chart, Charles Stross 
     The Battle of Salamis, Barry Strauss
    ONE STAR
    A Manual for Creating Atheists, Peter Boghossian
     Raising Steam, Terry Pratchett 
     The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
     The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks 
     Darwin’s Radio, Greg Bear
     Fourth-Generation Warfare and Other Myths, Antulio Echevarria
    I miss the bowls
    When I was a kid, New Years Day meant hearing my mother, who grew up in Pasadena, watching the Rose Parade. I’d watch the four bowl games, the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Rose Bowl, and finally, the Orange Bowl.
    And sure, it wasn’t always possible to know who the “national champion” was, but nobody really cared all that much, what was important was that the Big Ten won the Rose Bowl, that Oklahoma didn’t win the Orange Bowl, and that the games featuring the sort of matchups you hadn’t seen before were either a) good games or b) ridiculous blowouts. I don’t even know why I hated Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Michigan, and Notre Dame, or why I liked Baylor, Texas, Ohio State, Pitt, Florida State, and USC. But I had a favorite in every major conference
    For me, things started to fall apart with the Bowl Coalition in 1992. The Big 10 and Pac-10 wisely held out for three years, but everything went south, literally, with the Bowl Alliance and the creation of a national championship played at the Fiesta Bowl on January 2nd.
    Now, I no longer even watch college football on New Years Day. I don’t know who is playing in the bowls, and I don’t care. Are people any happier or more interested in college football now that the “national championship” is the de facto SEC championship? It appears I’m not the only one who is less interested in the unambiguous national championship system.
    • “The average attendance for bowl games has declined each of the past six
       seasons, down to 49,116 last season, the lowest mark since 1978-79, when
       there were 15 bowls, according to the NCAA bowl record book.”
    • “The Michigan State/Stanford Rose Bowl earned the top audience of the BCS
       slate, with a 10.2 U.S. rating and 18.6 million viewers on ESPN New
       Year’s Day — up 9% in ratings and viewership from Stanford/Wisconsin
       last year (9.4, 17.0M), and flat and up 6%, respectively, from
       TCU/Wisconsin in 2011 (10.2, 17.6M). Despite the increase, the game tied
       the second-lowest rating ever for the Rose Bowl.
    • The UCF/Baylor Fiesta Bowl drew a 6.6 U.S. rating and 11.2 million
       viewers Tuesday night, down 11% in ratings and 9% in viewership from
       Oregon/Kansas State last year (7.4, 12.3M), and down 21% and 18%,
       respectively, from Oklahoma State/Stanford in 2011 (8.4, 13.6M). The
       game earned the second-lowest rating and viewership for the Fiesta Bowl
       in the BCS era, ahead of only Oklahoma/Connecticut in 2010 (6.2, 10.8M). Overall, the Orange and Fiesta Bowls rank among the ten lowest rated BCS bowls of all time. 
    • In 2014, the BCS Championship game drew in 25.5 million viewers, and that was just the ninth-watched BCS title in history.
    Here is what appears to be the root of the problem: “They (ESPN) need live content, even mediocre live content,” Maestas
     told USA TODAY Sports. “Even 400,000 viewers in a sad bowl with 25,000
     people in the stands is getting better (viewership) than 100 channels
     out there.”
    But what’s good for ESPN isn’t necessarily good for the game of college football. Quite the opposite, it appears. At least the NFL, for all its lunatic lurching about in its attempt to grow its female audience, is in control of its own destiny. This may explain why I won’t be watching a single bowl game today, but will not miss a single playoff game this weekend.
    Traffic report 2014
    The growth in site traffic was less spectacular than in 2013, and we saw a 1.5-million pageview month instead of the two-million one that I speculated might be possible, but traffic was nevertheless solid and both VP and AG continued to enjoy increased readership, with an overall 19.7 percent increase in pageviews over the course of the year. And, if anything, it’s picking up, as December 2014 was up 38 percent in comparison with December 2013.
    In 2014, Vox Popoli had 11,236,085 pageviews and Alpha Game 4,457,537 for a total of 15,693,622 Google pageviews. To the left is a
     chart showing the monthly traffic for both blogs over the last four
     years; even without Alpha Game, VP has grown from 11,383 to 34,809 average daily pageviews. Combined, Vox Popoli and Alpha Game are now running at a average rate of 47,343 daily pageviews. Not quite 50k, I’m afraid, not even if they are converted to the slightly more generous WordPress metric. As for the running annual totals, they are as follows:
    2008: 3,496,757 
     2009: 4,414,801
     2010: 4,827,183
     2011: 5,969,066
     2012: 7,774,074
     2013: 13,111,695
     2014: 15,693,622
    I doubt we’ll be able to maintain a 2-year doubling rate for a third straight year, since that would require nearly 11 million more pageviews in 2015, but one never knows. And speaking of nearly 50k daily pageviews, I would be remiss if, for no particular reason at all, I did not continue with a certain comparison
     that was repeatedly brought to my attention in previous years. This is,
     of course, the comparison with the hugely famous and massively popular
     Whatever, formerly the biggest and best-known site in science fiction. The following chart shows the comparative
     blog traffic over the last six years as measured in Google Pageviews.
      
     
    Interesting, is it not, that Whatever’s traffic has now declined below the point that mine was when it was declared irrelevant on the basis of its paltry traffic by McRapey’s fans? So, have we seen Peak McRapey? It’s hard to say, as he’s increasingly moved to Twitter, an ideal medium for his unique combination of fabrication, snark, and self-promotion.
    I found the 2014 totals to be particularly amusing in light of this clueless post by an SF Pinkshirt named Nalini Haynes who went public with her strategy to starve the Supreme Dark Lord: “My website averages well over 600 visits a day. Based on comments from
     other fanzine people, I’m guessing that’s more readers than VD’s blog
     would get even when he provokes a shit storm. Let’s deprive him of the
     traffic.”
     Apparently it didn’t work so well. Anyhow, 2015 promises to be an interesting year at VP and hopefully a much better one than 2014 was. While the Hugo debacle was entertaining and the Castalia launch went much better than anticipated, I didn’t finish Book Two, Alpenwolf didn’t finish First Sword, and there were some very difficult situations being experienced behind the scenes by friends and family. If, at any point last year, you sensed I didn’t give even the smallest damn about the various public contretemps, you were correct.
    But we’ve got two new partners and an exciting new project in the works at Alpenwolf, both First Sword and Book Two will be out this year, and we’ve got a number of new writers, new bloggers, and new books to announce in the next few months at Castalia. So, thank you for your interest (even if it is no more than morbid curiosity), thank you for your support, and I hope you will come along for the ride in the new year.
    The blog star
    It’s no slight to Daniel, Scooter, Mascaro, or me to say that Jeffro, of the Space Gaming Blog, has been the star of the Castalia House blog this year. He makes everyone up their game by starting each week off with an intriguing, in-depth post, and gives our four new bloggers a high level of excellence to aim for. And fortunately for everyone, he appears to enjoy blogging there:
     I am not shy about pointing out how happy I am with how this is shaping up. I cover the full range gaming topics: vintage stuff, current releases, role-playing games, wargames, everything! I write in such a way that you can get something out of a post even if you don’t buy or play the game in question. I put things into the wider context of gaming history and touch on the literary antecedents of the games we play. And yeah, I occasionally get esoteric, but I try to stay readable and comprehensible to people that aren’t gamers. No matter what, though, I never stray from the voice of someone that actually knows how to articulate how these things work in actual play… and that just freakin’ loves to play the heck out of these things.
    I have complained about how games are covered in magazine articles and so forth in the past. I am just so rarely satisfied with how “journalists” and commentators portray games and gaming in general. Voicing that sort of concern almost invariably summons a smarty pants type that sneers back, “oh, you’re just complaining; the best answer to this sort of thing is to go out show us the right way to do it.” Well listen here, bucko… I’ve done it now.
    If you’ve enjoyed Jeffro’s exploration of Chapter N this year, don’t be shy about going to his blog and letting him know. What I particularly enjoy about his posts is the way he dives deeply into the game mechanical aspects as well as the experience; he represents the perfect blend of SF/F literature and gaming that is of particular interest to a game designer who occasionally dabbles in fiction.