Castalia Library update

Book 01 (NOV/DEC) THE MISSIONARIES by Owen Stanley is being bound. The books are anticipated to be shipped the week of March 23-27. The Library print run is 500.

Book 02 (JAN/FEB) THE MEDITATIONS by Marcus Aurelius is being printed. The books are anticipated to be shipped in April. The Library print run is 650.

Book 03 (MAR/APR) AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND by John C. Wright is being laid out and the interior illustrations are being prepared. The print run is undetermined.

Book 04 (MAY/JUN) is being selected. It will either be the first volume of PLUTARCH’S LIVES or INFERNO by Dante.

For future reference, please check the Arkhaven blog for regular updates concerning Castalia Library and the fulfillment of the various crowdfunding projects.

CLARIFICATION: Because, apparently, it is not entirely obvious from the observable evidence, if you do not subscribe to SOMETHING for more than $5 per month that does not involve substantial built-in costs in its own right, (translation: Hero of the Revolution), you are not eligible for a SocialGalactic subscription. If you are involved in one-off flat-free projects such as a crowdfunding campaign, that is recognized in the SG world by the relevant badge and can receive an invitation by subscribing to either UATV or directly to SocialGalactic.

I am, after all, an economist by training, and therefore not inclined to make the obvious mistake of putting SG in a position of taking on unlimited expenses on the basis of fixed revenues.

Mailvox: the new Gamma

A woman in a female-dominated company writes about the reaction of her fellow employees to a new Gamma male:

Repellant to women. That phrase just keeps coming back to me, as it perfectly describes the reaction of nearly everyone at my workplace to the recent hiring of a Gamma.

We work in a small office with around 20 people, only three of whom are men. I would assess two of them as Deltas: hard working, polite, able to give – and take – a joke without causing or taking offense. The girls all love them in a brotherly sense, have little inside jokes with them, etc. However, the New Guy™ is an entirely different story. He perceives himself to be charming, witty and attractive, tries to engage all of us with “witty bon mots” and other conversational gambits.

Scuttlebutt around the lunch table yesterday consisted of, “He’s not going to last long.” “Well, I wish he would hurry up and quit then. “ “I don’t like him.” “I don’t appreciate his sense of humour”. As well as comments about what a girls’ blouse he was for nearly bursting into tears when one of the girls complained to the boss (he was eavesdropping) about how she found his habit of asking for too much personal information unsettling. He stormed out, and then had to be talked into returning to work. They should have just let him leave. I also heard through the grapevine that the reason his nose “looks like that” is that he has been punched in the face so many times over the years that it has been broken more than once.

Every afternoon I find myself muttering shut up-shut up-shut up-shut up-shut up under my breath, as his talking escalates toward the end of the day.

I’m counting down the days until the petty sabotage begins. It’s going to be awful.

If you’re a gentleman who considers himself to be witty and charming, respectful of women though just ever-so-slightly roguish, and always capable of dropping the perfect movie quote at just the right moment, you should probably take this advice to heart. Yes, she is absolutely talking about you.

And shutting up is a very good place to start.

Bloomberg bows out

As I mentioned prior to the Super Tuesday voting, Mini-Mike didn’t get into the presidential race in search of public humiliation. He almost certainly thought he was going to have his “elevator moment” and trump the god-emperor because he has even more money. Needless to say, he was wildly incorrect, which is why he is jumping out as quickly as he jumped in.

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg ended his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on Wednesday and endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden. It was a stunning collapse for the former New York City mayor, who had his 2020 hopes on the Super Tuesday states and pumped more than $500 million of his own fortune into the campaign.

Bloomberg announced his departure from the race after a disappointing finish on Super Tuesday in the slate of states that account for almost one-third of the total delegates available in the Democratic nominating contest. He won only the territory of American Samoa and picked up several dozen delegates elsewhere. Biden, meanwhile, won big in Southern states where Bloomberg had poured tens of millions of dollars and even cautiously hoped for a victory.

Even tens of billions are less powerful than the socio-sexual hierarchy. You literally can’t buy Alpha, no matter how hard the Gamma tries.

Note that the media and the professional analysts, to say nothing of all the armchair experts in the comments, almost all said that Bloomberg was in it until the convention. And they were completely wrong. That is the result of failing to grasp the difference between capability and character. Bloomberg is an oversensitive billionaire who underrated the difficulty of public performance. He has probably wanted to get out of the race about twenty minutes into the Las Vegas debate, and his pathetic performance yesterday only underlined his desire to get out of the spotlight.

UPDATE: “I’m sorry we didn’t win but it’s still the best day of my life and tomorrow’s going to be even better.”

Total Gamma statement. The joke’s on them! The Secret King won again!

Biden won, Bloomberg’s done

Creepy Joe was the big winner of Super Tuesday 2020:

Biden won nine of the 15 primary contests at stake tonight, pulling off a number of upset victories, including a win in Minnesota (we’d projected Sanders would win there), a win in Massachusetts (Sanders again), and a win in Texas (that was more of a toss-up going into tonight), but basically Biden cleaned up across the board. He performed well in states where he wasn’t even really competing, and he proved he’s more than a regional candidate.

Sanders, on the other hand, did not have a great evening. He won just three states outright (Colorado, Utah and Vermont) and underperformed expectations. So far, he does seem on track to win delegate-rich California, though we won’t know the exact margin for a while yet.

The complete delegate totals and how they compared to the pre-primary projections:

  • 513/484 Biden
  • 461/463 Sanders
  • 53/222 Bloomberg
  • 53/162 Warren
That’s a huge and very public humiliation for Bloomberg, whose electoral appeal is obviously even more miniaturized than his stature.

The Democratic Party is coalescing around Joe Biden, whose campaign has been defined by many awkward gaffes and one incredible comeback. It was perhaps fitting Tuesday night that when Biden took the stage in Los Angeles to celebrate his historic day of victories, the first thing he did was accidentally confuse his wife and sister.

Italy don’t need no education

All the schools and universities in Italy are closed until the Ides of March:

Scuole e università chiuse per coronavirus in tutta Italia dal 5 al 15 marzo.

I can’t even imagine how happy this would have made me as a kid…. In considerably more important news, Serie A will continue, but the games will be played a porte chiuse, which is to say, in empty stadiums.

Super Tuesday

Today’s primaries should eliminate Bloomberg and provide some indication as to whether Democrats are looking to offer up the creep or the socialist as an offering to the God-Emperor:

It took a little longer than it sometimes does, but the early primary and caucus states performed their traditional role in the process of winnowing the field of candidates. The results of Super Tuesday will answer some big questions about the race.

First, the results today will tell us what the two main coalitions really look like. The first four small states offered clues, but the total number of voters in the 14 Super Tuesday states is exponentially larger. Sanders seems to have failed to grow his support among African Americans much beyond his 2016 percentages, but he has made inroads among Latino voters. He remains dominant among young voters and does better on the coasts and in the northeast. Biden is the candidate of African Americans, suburban moderates, the South, and older voters.

Many of the differences between these two groups are cultural, not ideological. But inside the Democratic Party there is a debate not unlike the one that divides the two main parties about the breadth of change that Washington should pursue. The Democrats’ moderate wing, which is now anchored by older black voters in the south, remains deeply skeptical of Sanders-style socialism, while the New New left, powered by young radicals in big cities, is repelled by the incrementalism of Biden.

Translation: the usual suspects have lost control of the party to the diversity. And let’s not forget 538’s final projections before they are vanished in the aftermath of the actual results:

  • 484 Biden
  • 463 Sanders
  • 222 Bloomberg
  • 162 Warren
UPDATE: initial returns look good for Biden, flat for Sanders, poor for Bloomberg.

UPDATE: Biden is projected to win both Virginia and North Carolina. With the projections this early, that means he’s winning them handily.

ASCENDANT kickstarter

Comic book RPGs tend to be sub-divided into “descriptor-based” and “effect-based” games. “Bolt of Fire” is a descriptor, while “Ranged Attack that 50 points of damage to one target” is an effect. A descriptor-based game prioritizes the descriptor over the effects. An effect-based prioritizes the effects over the descriptor.

Ascendant strives to be neither a descriptor-based nor effect-based game. It is, rather, a physics-based game. The game mechanics are intended to be the physics engine of the game world. Powers have both descriptors and effects. Some effects are precluded by the logic of the descriptor, and some descriptors inevitably entail certain effects. The mechanics are elaborate and detailed (as in an effect-based game) but they are also broad and universalized (as in a descriptor-based game). Players are expected and encouraged to use their powers in whatever manner makes sense within the physics of a comic-book world, but not in ways that don’t make sense.

If a descriptor-based system aims to let players experience a comic-book story; and an effect-based system aims to let players play a superhero game; our physics-based system aims to let players simulate a comic book world. To do so, we have created logarithmic chart-based universal mechanics, a style of design that has not been widely used in the last two decades, but which will be instantly familiar to fans of the classic FASERIP and MEGS RPGs from the 1980s. 

ALT-HERO fans will be pleased to know that although it is an entirely different superhero universe, ASCENDANT is based on the same set of brand new superhero RPG rules that the forthcoming ALT-HERO RPG is using. If you’d like to back our friends at Ascendant, you can do so here.

Immigration is war

What part of the tautology is hard for people to understand?

Europe has been put to test after Turkey provided free passage for scores of migrants heading westward, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said, describing Ankara’s move as an “attack on the EU.”

The latest move by Turkey to allow migrants to leave its territory over the weekend was an attack “on the European Union and Greece,” and also a “test for the EU,” Kurz said on Tuesday. If European countries cave in to Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s pressure, then 13,000 migrants desperately waiting at the EU border will only be “the beginning,” the Austrian Chancellor warned. According to Kurz, the migrants that amassed on the Greek border didn’t come from the war-ravaged parts of Syria as their exodus was “deliberately organized” by Turkey.

Germany’s former defense minister and European Commission’s sitting chief Ursula von der Leyen said that allowing potentially millions of migrants to enter Europe “cannot be an answer or solution” to Turkey’s problems in Syria.

Meanwhile, Greek authorities who struggled to hold back the wave on their borders, described it as “an invasion.” Greek police fired tear gas at migrants attempting to storm the border fence, while the coast guard tried to stop refugee dinghies by pushing them away outside the country’s southern islands.

Immigration has always been war. Whether it was the Mongols migrating to India, the Germans migrating to Italy, the Goths migrating to Byzantium, the Normans migrating to England, the Europeans migrating to the Americas, the Japanese migrating to China, the Germans migrating to Eastern Europe, or the Jews migrating to Canaan, the result has always been military occupation, followed by the large-scale slaughter and suppression of the native population.

And because immigration is war, open borders is surrender.

A non-entity vanishes

Sportswriter Jim Klobuchar’s daughter has abandoned her no-hope campaign:

Amy Klobuchar is ending her presidential campaign and will endorse Joe Biden later on Monday, according to a campaign aide, making her the third Democrat in three days to exit the race after Biden’s big win in the South Carolina primary.

The only reason she was a U.S. Senator in the first place is because Al Franken is a perv. She had absolutely no business running for President.

It is interesting that they’re all bowing out and endorsing Biden, though. Apparently the Democratic Party elders really don’t want to see the socialist jew blown out by the God-Emperor.

Sink the ships or else

The globalist media is attacking Greece for defending its borders against hundreds of thousands of hostile invaders:

Greek border police have shot dead a Syrian migrant attempting to reach Europe as clashes grow following Turkey’s announcement that the border was “open.”

The Greek border is being besieged by thousands of migrants convinced they can reach EU welfare havens following Ankara’s decision to stand down. Following clashes that saw migrants pelt police with rocks and other objects, one victim was shot through the mouth and died at the scene.

 “Open war is upon you whether you would risk it nor not.”