Tag: Arkhaven

The Dark Side of Star Trek

Star Trek was always problematic, and not just because of Gene Roddenberry’s alarming enthusiasm for young girls’ underwear, as the Dark Herald observes its intellectual roots at Arkhaven.

A bunch of scientists, engineers and assorted smartasses got together and create a new organization dedicated to conquering the world and running it with enlightened scientific centrally planned totality. No politics needed because there will be no dissent at all — after all, how can you dissent from the perfection of science?

This is called a “Technocracy.”

In Wells’ horrible dream of the future this organization was called the Modern State Movement, (The movie version was called Wings Over the World). From their base in Basra, the self-proclaimed Air Dictatorship begins a campaign to bring order to the world by force, suppressing warlike “backward” national regimes and establishing a unified, rational, scientific world order. And they were dressed like BUF Black Shirts with breast plates.

They impose global peace, eliminate national sovereignty, abolish all traditional political systems, and construct a universal education program designed to create scientifically minded citizens, (yeah nothing bad can come from that).

All religion is suppressed… Of course

Family structures are destroyed — this is the big one for all of the totalitarian movements. The state is what raises the kids, not their parents. The state is what teaches children their governing values, not their families. Marriage is a very temporary and ephemeral matter, both sides are urged to move on from it as quickly as possible. And depending on how honest the technocrats are being about it — incest is to be encouraged.

Material abundance returns through centralized planning and technological management. The world eventually becomes a world state — stable, secular, regimented, paternalistic, eternal and it sounds like my idea of Hell on Earth. This is a world governed by Madelaine L’Engle’s IT.

From Things to Come, you can trace a straight line through to Doctor Who to Asimov’s Foundation to 1960s liberal utopianism, and Walt Disney’s original plan for EPCOT.

A long time ago, I started writing what Nick Cole described as STAR WARS NOT STAR WARS with a co-writer. He was going to write STAR TREK NOT STAR TREK with a co-writer at the same time. But mine didn’t work out, for a variety of reasons, and Nick and Jason ended up writing STAR WARS NOT STAR WARS themselves, which was eventually published as GALAXY’S EDGE and worked out rather well for them.

It’s rather amusing that people in SF/F keep trying to cancel my science fiction career, when I am more than adept at sabotaging it myself. Did I ever mention that I turned down Blizzard and Simon & Schuster when they approved my outline for the first STARCRAFT novel and asked me to write it? The lesson, as always is this: just shut up, write what they want you to write, and stop getting in your own way.

But the Dark Herald’s piece does give me an excellent idea… albeit one that will likely make JDA very, very sad.

In other writing news, I’ll be sending the OUT OF THE SHADOWS ebook to the Signed First Edition backers, the original MW ebook backers, and putting it up on Amazon this week. It will also be available as part of the Based Books Sale for everyone else. The paperback will be sent out to the MIDNIGHT’S WAR Vol. 7-12 backers along with THE TRAGEDY OF THE TRIBUNE omnibus both of them are ready.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Unmitigated Disaster

Hollywood has run out of magic tricks to conceal the fact that its raging didacticism isn’t entertaining.

The summer movie season, the biggest and most important for the industry, was an unmitigated disaster. The least attended, after adjusting for inflation, of any summertime period since 1981. That’s nearly 45 years ago.

The United States in 1981 also had roughly 110 million fewer people living in it. And there were fewer people at the movies this summer than that year. This is a five-alarm fire for Hollywood, no matter what they say about box office records of reaching certain hurdles of box office revenue year in and year out.

This October saw just $445 million in total box office. The last pre-COVID October saw roughly $1 billion in ticket sales. What’s behind all this, and what can be done to fix it?

Well, one of the big problems is that Hollywood made itself into a political activist organization. Stars, personalities and creative talent have spent much of the past decade telling more than half the country that they hate them and despise their way of life. That doesn’t help. They’ve prioritized subject matter with miniscule appeal instead of the broad, successful comedies and dramas of the past.

The COVID lockdowns supported by the industry also decimated moviegoing. Audiences stayed home, waiting for streaming services, instead of buying tickets to go to the theater. Then, in the aftermath, the industry chasing short-term streaming service gains, shortened the window between theatrical releases hitting, say, Disney+.

That’s all created incentives for people to simply wait a few weeks or a month for a non-event movie to hit the internet. So films are losing money at the box office, then hitting streaming where the return on investment is substantially worse for studios. It’s a mess.

One of the biggest factors? Quality has inarguably dropped.

Marvel Studios, one of the most reliable factories of mid-level entertainment, abandoned its formulas in favor of hitting specific quotients and targets based on political priorities. It backfired, spectacularly. Bomb after bomb followed their about face. Disney animation and Pixar churned out low-quality progressive slop, undermining their hard-won reputations. Now, outside of sequels, most audiences have stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt.

I’m seeing a little bit of this from the inside of late. It’s clear that Hollywood is essentially one giant herd mentality with a hive mind, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphors. Everyone is afraid to step outside of the ever-shrinking box, so it’s becoming increasingly impossible to simply tell a straightforward story capable of entertaining anyone.

Fan service in sequels and familiar beats in remakes is all they had left to offer, and that well has apparently run dry. Fortunately, the collapse of Hollywood and the rise of AI is going to create a fantastic opportunity for UATV and Arkhaven, so if you’re not already on board with both, this is the time, because the ride is just getting rolling.

A frame from a video render of Midnight’s War.

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Big Sale Next Week

So, a few things to let everyone know about in the leadup to the annual Castalia Library and Castalia House Thanksgiving sale. We’re going to have a number of Arkhaven and Castalia House products on sale at the NDM site as well as the Library and Libraria books, and we’ll have Library, Libraria, and Junior Classics on sale at the Arkhaven store. So, you’ll definitely want to check out both sites, although I’ll try to have a post with links to everything here.

The Based Book ebook sale is also coming up, and we’ll keep you posted on that too.

Now, we also have an offer for MIDNIGHT’S WAR backers. For a variety of reasons, mostly relating to artists, we’re not going to be doing the planned 7-12 issue anytime soon. However, what we are offering both paperback and hardcover backers as a substitute is the following:

  1. Your choice of any Arkhaven omnibus of the same length of 140+ pages
  2. The soon-to-be-released THE TRAGEDY OF THE TRIBUNE: A Throne of Bones Issue 1, which is now complete, 150 full-color pages, and includes stories from A Throne of Bones and Summa Elvetica. We never crowdfunded this one, but it was illustrated by Midnight’s War illustrator Ademir Leal and colored by Blond, so it’s absolutely top quality.
  3. We’ll also include a complimentary ebook and paperback edition of the now-complete Midnight’s War novel OUT OF THE SHADOWS for all of the affected MW backers.

I’ll send out an email tomorrow to all of the MW 7-12 backers so everyone can let me know their preference. We still plan to tackle it someday, but it’s so far out of the schedule at this point that we don’t want to leave those backers hanging any longer. The leather edition backers are unaffected; we will still be releasing that as well as NIGHT STREETS soon, as it is complete.

And finally, since we decided to do the larger edition of Hypergamouse for the coffee table backers, we’re going to be offering the smaller ones, which are probably some of the highest-quality traditional horizontal comic books ever produced, for sale to anyone who wants one until the 150 or so copies that we’ve got run out.

DISCUSS ON SG

Leveling Up

On last night’s Darkstream, after discussing the recent unmasking of longtime civic nationalists as the foreign ethnonationalists they truly are, I demonstrated some interesting AI technologies that I’m optimistic will allow Arkhaven to start putting up digital shorts on UATV soon. Here are two examples of screenshots, not rendered images, screenshots from a digital video, based on the lead character of the Black Warrant comic.

And below it are two screenshots taken from a digital video from Midnight’s War. Notice that while the scene is familiar, neither image is a specific image that you’ve seen before from the comics, they are from the videos produced using those images as starting points.

If this is the sort of project you’d be interested in volunteering for – which would require getting your own subscriptions to one or more AI services – feel free to mention that in the comments on SG. And if its the sort of thing you’d like to help support, please subscribe to UATV.

To be clear, this is NOT related to the Black Warrant project for which The Legend and I completed the script yesterday. That’s a traditional film project with a studio, a producer, and the works which we are not going to be financing. But the current state of the technology, combined by our vast library of comic art, suggests to me that the time for micro-episodes and eventually episodes of longer stories is now dawning.

It feels rather like where we were with AI music about this time last year. And if you watched last night’s Darkstream, it’s easy to see how far that has come in the last 12 months.

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Leave the Dead Where They Lie

Andrew Torba writes eloquently on the necessity of building new platforms and moving away from the dying old mainstream ones:

Let me start by being perfectly clear: you are not going to infiltrate the system and magically take over legacy institutions. This isn’t some Mission Impossible movie or Fight Club, it’s real life. Anyone who genuinely believes this is possible has clearly never set foot inside a real legacy institution. I am talking about the corporate boardrooms, the government agencies, the universities, and the mainstream media conglomerates. These are not blank slates or neutral grounds. They are highly sophisticated systems engineered over generations with one primary purpose: to perpetuate themselves and eliminate any threat to their established dogma.

These institutions possess a powerful immune system. It is a literal set of defensive mechanisms designed to identify and expel dissident thought. They have endless bureaucratic procedures that can bury any reform effort in red tape. They have human resources departments that function as ideological compliance units, enforcing a secular progressive creed. They have anonymous reporting hotlines that encourage coworkers to snitch on each other for wrongthink. There are layers upon layers of protection designed specifically to prevent what some would naively call a dissident coup.

If you enter one of these institutions, you face a binary choice with no middle ground. You will conform, or you will be annihilated. You will slowly, inevitably, become the very thing you claim to oppose. You will be pressured to attend mandatory training seminars that label your Christian faith as hate speech. You will be forced to sign loyalty oaths to ideologies that dismantle the natural family and deny biological reality. You will be expected to celebrate degeneracy and mock tradition. If you refuse to comply, you will be ostracized, investigated, and finally ejected. Your career will be terminated and your name will be blacklisted across the entire industry. This is not a theory. This is the lived experience of millions of our people who tried to make a stand from within.

Just look at these institutions themselves. Do we really want to encourage young people to spend the next thirty years living a lie so they can magically “capture” them at some distant point in the future? They are rotting husks. Hollowed out cathedrals of a dead century. They operate on pure inertia and a deep, desperate fear. They are managed by cowardly souls who long ago traded their convictions for a steady paycheck and a vague sense of prestige. They believe in nothing but their own self preservation. They can smell your dissent, your faith, your love for your people, and they will react like a body rejecting a transplanted organ.

The idea that you can simply lay low for thirty years, hide your true beliefs, and slowly rise through the ranks to take over this dying establishment is not a strategy. It is a fantasy. It is a voluntary life sentence in a spiritual prison. It is a plan to waste your one precious life chained to a corpse.

He’s absolutely right. Look how much effort, and how many tears, were wasted on Wikipedia and the biases of its 500 admins. If everyone who cried about Wikipedia’s falsehoods and slanders had simply become an editor on Infogalactic and edited the article they were crying about, Infogalactic would have far surpassed Wikipedia by now.

Because they are subversive by nature, SJWs are keenly sensitive to interlopers and heretics who have not entirely succumbed to convergence. They will never, ever, permit anyone who is not entirely infested by the mind-virus to come anywhere close to positions of power or influence, unlike naive conservatives who couldn’t wait to vote for a black man for president and get a little spring in their step when they can preen about the new female pastor at their church.

No one seeks their enemies’ approval and scorns their friends like a conservative.

In keeping with this theme of new platforms, I’m very pleased to be able to say that Arktoons will not only be continuing, but will even be undergoing a renovation of sorts, as we have a new dev taking responsibility for the maintainance and development of the platform who is already very experienced with it and is fully in sync with the needs of the creators.

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Paypal is Turned Off

Castalia Library, SG, and Arkhaven subscribers should be informed that the Arkhaven store no longer accepts Paypal. There hasn’t been any denial of service or anything like that, but we just don’t make enough use of it to justify including it as a payment option. And whether they permit us to keep using it or not, we’re very aware that it’s not a service upon which we believe we can reasonably rely.

There are only a very small number of Library subscribers affected, and we’ll get in touch with all of them in the next two weeks to make sure they make a smooth transition without losing any books. This will have no effect on anyone’s access to SG or anywhere else; we will come up with a replacement sometime in the next month or two. With regards to Arkhaven, we’re looking very hard if continuing Arktoons in its present form makes any sense or not due to the fact that we presently have no devs working on it.

We haven’t made any decisions, but we always periodically look at whether resources spent on one project would be more wisely allocated somewhere else and since we’ve just shut down the ability to subscribe to Arktoons, this is the right time to do that.

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FADE TO BLACK

This theme song for the upcoming BLACK WARRANT crowdfund, FADE TO BLACK has proved popular on both AI Central and Sigma Game, so I put it up on UATV for the subscribers. The comic is already done, the novel is done, and the script for the film is two-thirds done. This is going to be big.

If he shows up at your door, you’re the one who brought him there…

The crazy thing is that this isn’t even the hardest-hitting song on the soundtrack.

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The Marvel Method

The Dark Herald shares an insider’s description of the Marvel method of movie-making at Arkhaven.

Like Matt Shakman and the writers of #FantasticFour, I’ve sat in the ‘creative meetings’ at @MarvelStudios. They’re horrible.

You basically sit in a room with Kevin Feige and Lou D’Esposito and try to pitch your movie while realizing Kevin just wants you to dictate his rushed thoughts. Victoria [Alonso] used to be in these, but Kevin and Lou had so mistreated her that in one of my #Blade meetings she just showed up with sugar cookies she’d baked to improve morale.

You’re told NOT to pitch ideas from the comics because Lou isn’t a big comic guy and it’ll turn him off.

You talk about craft, story, and characters only for Kevin and Lou to say ‘yeah well, all we need to do is make sure it’s fun.’

There’s no spark. There’s no vision. Marvel is a slaughterhouse factory where you watch fresh meat get spoiled as it slowly makes its way through the assembly gears of mediocre thinking — and this weird hatred for their own product.

It’s become increasingly obvious that they only got lucky with the original Iron Man – which really was only a great movie for the first 15 minutes – because Disney wasn’t involved at the time. It’s really remarkable how far they’ve been able to coast on less than 45 minutes total of genuinely good movie-making.

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Last Call for Coffee

One of the elite rewards of the Hypergamouse campaign was the Coffee Table Book, which is a large horizontal edition with only two panels per page, thereby spreading out each episode to two pages and permitting larger panels and higher resolution art. This backer’s edition is now available at NDM Express as well as at the Arkhaven store and features the first 100 episodes of the popular comic as well as the nine episodes of the original black-and-white comic drawn by the original illustrator. NDM Express is recommended if you have credit card issues at Arkhaven.

There are more details at Sigma Game if you’re interested, including a picture of a test binding of the Hypergamouse leather edition in the new burgundy pigskin. But today is the last day to obtain a copy of this special edition with a very limited print run of less than 150.

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Coffee Table Book

One of the elite rewards of the Hypergamouse campaign was the Coffee Table Book, which is a large horizontal edition with only two panels per page, thereby spreading out each episode to two pages and permitting larger panels and higher resolution art. This backer’s edition is now available at the Arkhaven store and at NDM Express. NDM Express is recommended if you have credit card issues at Arkhaven. We’re doing this for the benefit of those who missed the campaign for one week only and features the first 100 episodes of the Arkhaven comic as well as the nine episodes of the original black-and-white comic drawn by the original illustrator.

Each episode features large panels and stretches across two pages, which is why although the coffee table book is 222 pages, the content is exactly the same as the 115-page hardcovers and paperbacks that have already shipped out to all of the backers, including the essays by Vox and Lacey. It also has the special gold Arkhaven logo that is reserved for first editions. You can see more pictures, including the cover, at Sigma Game.

The price of the book is $169, which includes shipping. It’s a uniquely collectible and historical book. Unfortunately, the window of opportunity to buy a copy is just six more days, since the print run is going to be small, limited, and ordered very soon.

As for the leather edition, as you can see, we are making progress. And as will only be clear to the most discerning eyes, we will also be introducing our new pigskin leather with it.

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