The End of The Escapist

The collapse of The Escapist is an object lesson in when SJWs and financial interests take over a previously successful company:

When people ask me how to get into games journalism these days, my main piece of advice is “don’t.” I’m really not kidding, as while I am privileged to be where I am, it’s an almost impossible path to walk given the state of the industry and the instability found within.

Case in point, a wild scene unfolded last night as long-time gaming site The Escapist fired some of its team members, including EIC Nick Calandra, for reportedly not meeting goals set by its parent company Gamurs.

After Calandra was fired, Escapist staff members, contributors and producers all took to Twitter to announce they were also leaving the site, with many of them indicating they would be working on some new project with Calandra directly.

The departures and firings essentially cleaned out the entirety of The Escapist’s video department, including most significantly at all, the departure of Yahtzee Croshaw, the voice of Zero Punctuation, one of the oldest and most famous game criticism video series, and one I grew up watching long before I started doing this for a living. Croshaw resigned, but he does not own the rights to Zero Punctuation itself, so whatever he does next, it will be without that branding. Though it’s obvious the branding can’t survive without him, even if The Escapist retains it.

By all accounts Calandra was a great EIC, and clearly inspired a lot of loyalty in those working for him, given the events of last night. Gamurs feels like yet another company trying to squeeze blood from a stone with likely unreasonable growth targets in an industry where large increases are more or less impossible.

‘The Escapist’ Faces Mass Resignations After EIC Firing, 7 November 2023

Nor is The Escapist the only place where some major shakeups in entertainment journalism are coming. It’s going to be intriguing to see how things develop going forward, as some of our competitors – who shall go unnamed – are similarly structured and are facing similar pressures, which suggests that it may not be too much longer before experiencing similar disruptions forced by the financial interests.

As to why this is suddenly happening among companies that were acquired in the last ten years, the answer is economic: the acquisitions were made with debt that was obtained at historically low interest rates. Now that the interest rates on that debt is rising, the acquisitions are no longer as profitable as the acquiring company expected them to be, thereby leading the acquirers to put pressure on the acquired companies to produce more and more money.

Once these debt finance-driven demands start cutting into the resources required to perform basic functions, and once key personnel start leaving instead of subjecting themselves to the ever-increasing demands of the new owners, the death spiral has begun and the fate of the organization is sealed.

Which, of course, is a very good thing for its stronger, more conservative competitors.

DISCUSS ON SG

Infection is the Strategy

And not just in the context of allowing Covid-19 free access to the UK:

Dominic Cummings: “Britain has not been able to control its borders for many years, it doesn’t have the infrastructure to do it. If we had the capability it would only delay things by a trivial amount. And some people said closing the border was racist.. But if you’re going for a single wave herd immunity by September strategy, then faffing around with the borders wasn’t relevant”

Hugo Keith: “Do you mean, there was no point to shut out borders because the strategy was for people to get infected?”

Dominic Cummings: “Correct”

The borders of the West are being kept open in order to better sicken, harm, and ultimately replace the indigenous people of European Christendom.

DISCUSS ON SG

Junior Classics ebook editions

In order to maximize the availability of the Castalia Junior Classics to every homeschooling family, we’ve now made the Junior Classics volumes 1-8 available as ebook editions in DRM-free EPUB format for less than $35 for the 3,500-page set. Ebook backers of the project should check their emails tonight, as we’ll be sending out a code that will provide for a free download of all eight volumes, which are as follows:

  1. Fairy Tales & Fables
  2. Myths & Legends
  3. Tales of Greece & Rome
  4. Heroes of Chivalry
  5. Tales That Never Grow Old
  6. Stories of Boys & Girls
  7. The Animal Book
  8. Heroes of History

Readers have already seen what the covers and spines look like, but the interiors bear consideration too, as the layouts are done to the exacting Castalia Library specifications and feature literally hundreds of classic illustrations. Volume VII: The Animal Book contains the most illustrations of any book we’ve published to date; THE SEA OTTER is a particularly beautiful tale about one of my favorite animals.

    While Volume VIII: Heroes of History doesn’t contain as many illustrations as its predecessor, it does contain 35 stories about unforgettable historical figures from the most famous to the now-obscure spanning more than 2,000 years. Which means the young reader of this volume will come away with a grasp of human history that likely exceeds that of the average college history major.

    Volumes 9 and 10 are expected to be released next summer. We do not anticipate releasing these ebook editions as single volumes, but if we do, it will probably be via Amazon and not via the Arkhaven store.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    Ignore the Boomer Ghosts

    The Kurgan responds to Karl Denninger’s Boomer blackpilling:

    In the big scheme of things, those who do not reproduce sufficiently die out. Nature is pretty brutal about it and tends to operate on the principles of large numbers. And exceptions to that rule because of different large numbers.

    It may just be humanity’s lot that we go the way of mouse utopia aka Universe 25. In which case, we’re all doomed and so are all our children. And if so, why worry about it. Worrying about it would be a total waste of time. Besides which you do NOT know this for certain, so assuming it off the bat is an error. So, as a function of reason and logic, this specific idea must be ignored.

    Treating it as valid or true can only lead you to depression and misery in a situation where your irrational belief in a “certainty” you cannot possibly know is a certainty, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This point alone, the Universe 25 possibility, should make it obvious that similar thoughts that lead down similar (if less total) outcomes are also to be ignored.

    So for example, the idea that “all white people will soon be extinct” or “high IQ people do not breed together because there is not enough of them” or the more common “marriage and children is a loser’s game because all women are whores and will divorce-rape you” and all the various variants of that kind, are in essence self-fulfilling, loser’s bets on life. The fact that your specific marriage may turn into a hellscape, or your specific life becomes a dead end is not relevant to the entire sub-species you represent.

    Yes nature does not care about you specifically, but you specifically can and do affect nature. Make 15 children and chances are most of them survive. If they all too make 15 children from age 20 on, like you did, guess what the landscape of your tribe looks like 100 years from now if you just start out with you and your wife as Adam and Eve? On that basis, starting with you and your wife having had 15 children by the time you are both say 40, if all your children and theirs and so on do the same, meaning that every 40 years they all have a batch of 15 children each, if you lived to be 140, you would have over 17 thousand descendants. 17,275 to be exact. And if the average age of death was say 80, then almost all of them would still be alive, since the first iteration (at year 20) is only 135 people. And that’s only ONE family. Imagine if you have ten such families in the same area. You now have a small nation after one century. Which in the scheme of things is not so much time. And if the genetic serums actually sterilise and wipe out most of humanity, you will not only be a small nation, you will be the majority within it. And it might not be such a small geographical area after all. Now imagine them all of the same religion that takes no crap from depopulationist satanists like Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates and their pedophile friends.

    “But people don’t make 15 children each, and how do you feed them all, and send them to college?!?”

    Patience grasshopper. People who bought the lies and live in clown world no longer make 15 children. But people did do that for centuries in Catholic countries. And that was before the internet, and Amazon deliveries, and often before indoor plumbing and central heating, and certainly before electricity and tractors and industrial fertilisers and automated harvesting machines… so let that sink in a little and park it in your brain somewhere while we continue to look at reality and possibilities instead of the ghosts boomers put in your head.

    This is one of the many reasons why it is good to hate the Boomer, or at the very least, to reject the Boomer and all his pomps and all his philosophies. Hope is not only a virtue, it is one of the three primary Christian virtues, along with Faith and Love.

    Don’t worry about college. It’s a net-negative artifact of the 1960s-1990s anyhow. If you’re going to walk the path of the materialistic hedonist, you shouldn’t be getting married and having children anyhow, just plug into the pharma-sexual matrix and extinguish yourself over time in an overdose of Clown World oxytoxin.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    Reddit Bans Autarch

    As well as any discussion of the RPG Adventurer, Conqueror, King System that has been so successfully crowdfunded:

    This is, for Autarch, a triumph of the greatest magnitude. I am profoundly grateful to all of the backers who have supported and continue to support my magnum opus. Thank you, truly.

    Of course, the success of ACKS II attracted the attention of some of the more unattractive denizens of the /r/rpg and /r/osr subreddits, who promptly began to defame and slander me with their usual half-truths, falsehoods, and slurs. When some of the ACKS community refused to allow the disparagement to go unrebutted, it led to a flame war the likes of which has not been seen since the days of the Usenet. Ultimately, the moderators decided it was best to simply ban discussion of both the game and designer, citing “brigading.”

    Evacuate? In Our Moment of Triumph?, 6 November 2023

    I think these sorts of bans are only helping advance the alternative economy. I can only speak for Castalia, but we have zero desire, much less any need, to be on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, or even Amazon. The more they attempt to silence and deplatform us, the more people climb out of their walled gardens in pursuit of something different, more traditional, and on average, better.

    And, as Autarch has discovered, the stronger and more independent we become.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    “The Whole Election is a Lie”

    Donald Trump is finally coming out and telling the truth about the 2020 election:

    Donald Trump has claimed that he won all 50 states in the 2020 US election at a Florida event where two of his rivals for the Republican presidential primaries were booed for suggesting the party should dump the former president before his legal woes catch up with him.

    Mr Trump faces 91 criminal charges across four indictments, two of which are related to election interference. He is set to testify on Monday at his New York civil fraud trial, related to his business dealings in the state, after two of his children took to the witness stand last week.

    Despite soundly losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden by more than seven million votes — 306 to 232 in the electoral college — Mr Trump continues to push discredited claims of widespread election fraud.
    During a speech at the Freedom Summit, outside Orlando, Florida, on Saturday night, he referred to his victories in the Republican primaries in the run-up to the 2020 US election and said: “We won, the last time, 50 states, think of it, 50 states.”

    “We won every state. We then did great in the election. We got 12 million more votes or so … 12 million more votes than we got the first time.

    “The whole thing is a lie … the whole election is a lie.”

    I have no doubt whatsoever that Donald Trump is correct and that it is the discreditors who are themselves discredited by their refusal to admit the widespread election fraud. The reason: Donald Trump did get considerably more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, and there is no way, absolutely no way in this or any other universe, that Joe Biden received more votes in Minnesota than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 or than Barack Obama did in 2012 and 2008. None whatsoever. There is no quantity of mushrooms, DMT, and other hallucinogenics that would render that scenario even remotely imaginable.

    Also, Clown World is reliably fake and gay. Ergo, whatever a clown claims to be true is guaranteed to be at best misleading, at worst, a complete inversion of the truth. By which principle we can safely conclude that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself, Ukraine is not winning the NATO-Russian war, China is not on the verge of societal collapse, and Joe Biden did not win the popular vote in the U.S. Presidential Election of 2020.

    DISCUSS ON SG

    The Last Lesson of Bobby Knight

    An intriguing epitaph of the late, great Indiana basketball coach:

    Knight was an almost Shakespearean character: brilliant, thoughtful and tragically flawed. In the late 1980s, he happened to show up on a rare evening when high school recruit Calbert Cheaney had a bad night. He upbraided his assistants for dragging him to see a player clearly not good enough for Indiana. They explained he had caught Cheaney on a bad night and should see him play again. Knight told them he wouldn’t waste any more time, nor should they.

    Cheaney committed to Evansville — coached by Jim Crews, who had played on Indiana’s 1976 team and coached under Knight for eight years. Knight was at a summer camp game a few months later and saw Cheaney again. This time, the real Calbert Cheaney showed up.

    “Why aren’t we recruiting that kid?” Knight asked his assistants.

    The assistants told him he had ordered them not to recruit Cheaney. “Why don’t you just give him a call and see if he might have any interest in Indiana?” Knight said.

    Cheaney, quite naturally, was thrilled. He chose Indiana, was the star of Knight’s last Final Four team in 1992 and is still the Big Ten’s all-time leading scorer. Crews was stunned that his old coach had recruited a player who had committed to him.

    “If some other coach did that to me, you’d call him every name in the book,” Crews said to Knight. “I know coaches do this sort of thing, but how could you do this to me?”

    Knight responded by telling Crews he would be nothing in basketball if not for him. Crews finally said, “You know something, Coach: The saddest part of your life is that you treat your enemies better than you treat your friends.”

    The truth in that statement is very sad.

    Peter King, in his NFL Football column, makes an accurate observation about how younger sports fans will wonder why anyone cares about the death of a coach of a minor university in a lesser sport: “It’s understandable that many will note the death of Knight and wonder how possibly could the basketball coach at Indiana be one of the five most dominant people in sports for 15, 20 years. He just was.” But if Bobby Knight had been a military general instead of a basketball coach, he would have been as famous as George Patton was, and probably more successful. He was a rare individual whose obvious talent was only exceeded by the force of his will.

    But Knight’s career is a cautionary tale in how one should not treat others, no matter how talented, driven, or successful one is. For some reason, all too many people insist on treating their enemies better than they treat their friends. This is wrong, in every application, and ultimately leads to failure in everything from marriage to business marketing.

    In your personal life, you should, you must, treat your partner, your family, and your friends better than you treat anyone else, most especially strangers. The idea that the closer you are to someone, the more you can “truly be yourself” and “be unconditionally accepted” despite your worst behavior is a pernicious one that is all too common today.

    And in your professional life, you should, you must, treat your core market and your loyal customers better than anyone else. The idea that you should focus your efforts on the periphery and on potential new customers in different markets is much in vogue, but it has reliably led to complete failure in everything from beer and NASCAR to Hollywood and video games.

    He always insisted he didn’t care what anyone cared about him when, in fact, he cared desperately and went so far out of his way to prove it that he hurt himself figuratively — and literally. Worse than that, he always had to have the last word — whether it was with referees, other coaches, players, the media and even his family.

    This is another important lesson. Two, in fact. First, nearly everyone cares what most people think about them. The only people who genuinely don’t are either a) neuroatypical, b) 3SD+ more intelligent than the norm,(1) c) psychologically scarred from childhood,(2) or some combination therein. So, attempting to erect an uncaring facade is both futile and transparent. And worse, most of the efforts required to protect that facade tend to harm the person behind it.

    As for needing to have the last word, this is just retarded and unnecessary. There is absolutely no point in repeating the same point over and over and over again, as most people do, much less resorting to insults and attacks because your feelings have been hurt when someone doesn’t agree with you. Did you somehow forget that you claimed you didn’t care what others thought? Then why are your feelings hurt, and why do you assume that they care what you think?

    So, RIP Bobby Knight. The remarkable thing about the General is that even in death, he is still capable of teaching important life lessons.

    (1) Contemplate the extent to which you care about a child or a literal retard thinks. Then consider the fact that in terms of IQ, they are closer to you than you are to Chris Langan.

    (2) It’s virtually impossible to replicate, or even simulate, those psychologies shaped by childhood experience, particularly prior to puberty. For good or for ill.

    DISCUSS ON SG