Tag: Arkhaven

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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Ten More Years

And Arkhaven will be able to release Superman and Batman comics.

DC Comics has announced that this year’s San Diego Comic-Con will be intended to start the run-up and build a campaign toward DC Comics 100th anniversary in 2035. Which is also the year that DC Comics will lose copyright to Batman, as seen in Detective Comics #27. With Superman the year before, the Joker the year after and Wonder Woman the year after that. At which point, Marvel will be able to put Batman in X-Men and Superman in the Avengers if they so wish. So basically, given that they will be losing the keys to their IP kingdom running up to their 100th anniversary, As Bleeding Cool has said, expect DC Comics to be publishing madder and madder titles with looser and looser creative restrictions because, for their 100th anniversary, anyone will be able to do anything they want without fear of legal repercussions. So they might as well make some money for that.

It seems to me it’s time to unleash The Legend so we’ll be ready for that day. It’s only a decade away, after all. Speaking of which, we’re finally wrapping up the illustrations for Alt-Hero 7-12, which will go out to the backers this autumn. We’re also going to refund/exchange all of the backers of Midnight’s War 7-12, since we will do a new crowdfund for that one if we decide to continue it in the absence of the original illustrator.

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An Echo of Eco

Chapter Two: Bibliothecarius Scriptor Timoris

“For whoso speaketh of Time’s lie, seeketh his own destruction, wherein the keepers of chronology shall pursue him like water pursues the lowlands.”

— Anonymous marginalia, Codex Sangallensis 193

I could still feel the weight of the mysterious tome in my hands as I made my way to Father Umbertus’s private study. The symbols on its cover—a circle quartered by a cross—seemed to burn in my mind’s eye. What had I stumbled upon in that forgotten corner of our library? And why had the sight of it transformed our normally impassive librarian into a man seized by fear?

These questions churned within me as I approached his door. I had been summoned, as I knew I would be. Father Umbertus von Kreuzlingen had been the keeper of Saint Gallen’s literary treasures for longer than I had been alive—thirty-seven years of vigilance that had etched deep lines into his face and turned his beard the color of aged vellum. He was not a man easily disturbed. Yet when he had seen the book in my hands, his face had drained of color as if he beheld not parchment and leather, but the very gates of Hell.

The second episode – the first part of Chapter Two – is up on Arktoons and can be read there. I’ll be posting ~1000-word episodes five times a week, M-F, but I’ll only mention it here if there is a new chapter starting.

If you want to start from the beginning, please begin here: Annos Dormi.

And if you’re an Eco fan, let me know if you think it works or not.

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A WORKING MAN Review

Fandom Pulse reviews the film based on Chuck Dixon’s first Levon Cade novel.

A Working Man with Jason Statham is out in theatres this week and is beating Snow White for the top of the box office. The movie is a lot of fun with Jason Statham’s action delivering with a great character in Levon Cade and a cool supporting cast. There are some problems with the film, however, which stem from caricature villains as well as a couple of moments where the kidnapped young girl Jenny Garcia gets a little too “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” as a strong female lead in moments. These elements were not in the book Levon’s Trade, which was a much darker, more serious action thriller, and it’s a shame they didn’t follow the tone of that book more closely.

There are always going to be changes and compromises when translating a story from one medium into another. What works in a novel, or in a comic book, simply doesn’t work on film. And, of course, different media have different tropes and cliches toward which those who are operating in that medium tend to gravitate; given that David Ayers directed both THE BEEKEEPER and A WORKING MAN, the chances that the villains weren’t going to be colorful cartoons was zero.

However, the rising profile of The Legend suggests the possibility that the next movie in the Levon Cade series will be more true to the books, especially considering that nearly all of the criticism of what has thus far been a very successful film has been focused on various elements that were never in the novel. Chuck was not involved in writing the script, but we can hope that he will be in the next one.

And there will be no Hollywood influence at all in the films on which we are presently working; I’m very pleased to be able to say that not only has The Legend’s BLACK WARRANT already been optioned by a film production company, but there is a significant level of interest in what we’re tentatively calling the Silververse, a century-long shared Arkhaven comics universe that includes traditional heroes created by The Legend, Razorfist, JDA, and myself.

RED HORNET is a 1980s superhero.

The Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equality initiatives imposed by Marvel and DC Comics has utterly destroyed traditional superheroes such as The Punisher, Spiderman, Batman, and The Phantom, but when the old heroes fall, new heroes rise.

On a side note, those who have been around for a long time will recall the eerie coincidence when, two days after I published a short story called THE DEPORTED here on this site, the small Italian town in which it was set was completely destroyed by a landslide and had to be evacuated. So, you can probably imagine the thought that crossed my mind when two days after completing a climactic scene set in an abandoned skyscraper in certain city in Asia, I was greeted with headlines that read “Massive Earthquake in Bangkok; Tower Collapses”.

Fortunately, it turned out to be a different tower. And honestly, I don’t think I can be held responsible for the fates of all the towers in Bangkok. Although if a natural disaster takes place in Stockholm this week, I will have to give serious consideration to laying down my creative pen.

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