Tag: media

Downloadable Content

UPDATE: The Downloadable Content podcast is here if you would like to listen to it and were unable to do so live:

LIVE WEDNESDAY 9PM EST: Tune in at 9PM EST for our special guest, Vox Day! We’re going to be discussing #SadPuppies, #RabidPuppies, Entertainment Weekly, gaming, SJWs/CHORFs and more!  Vox Day, Larry Correia, and Brad R. Torgersen had tremendous success with their Rabid Puppies and Sad Puppies nomination slates and swept the Hugo awards with their recommendations.  We’re looking forward to hearing Day’s unique perspective on the sci-fi/fantasy community’s battle for creative and intellectual freedom!

I spoke with both vox.com and the American Spectator today, so it’s good to see that some media outlets are more responsible than Entertainment Weekly and Slate, which responded to the astonishing Sad Puppies revolution by running to John Scalzi, of all people. In fairness to Mr. Scalzi, what he said was, for once, entirely true.

As Will Shetterly points out on his blog, people have been manipulating the Hugo nomination processes for decades. (Shetterly recalls watching Orson Scott Card glad-handing his way through various gatherings, penning glowing reviews of fellow sci-fi travelers for his column, and otherwise using his superior resources to mount an effective awards campaign.) And it’s true that, in the past, authors and fans often ignited individual crusades around books they wrote or liked. Writer John Scalzi in particular was famous for opening the threads on his blog to sci-fi and fantasy scribes who wanted to remind the community that their work was Hugo-eligible. But, Scalzi told me on the phone, explicitly anointing and championing a full group of titles, while not illegal, violates convention. It is unprecedented.

Anyhow, tune into 405 Media if you’re interested. Today was hilarious, though, due to this epic clash of SJW vs Sad Puppy. It was like watch a kitten fight a riding lawnmower.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
I wish Larry Corriea had the balls to admit the reason he started the Sad Puppies campaign was that he just wanted a Hugo so fucking bad.

Larry Correia ‏@monsterhunter45
I turned down my Hugo nomination and you still didn’t make the ballot. @scalzi

Brad Torgersen confronts the beast

It’s a little ironic that Brad Torgersen is being accused of racism, which you’ll understand if you click on the link:

What disturbs me more is that the field of SF/F is stooping this low.
That some of my colleagues — and no, contrary to my impression of the
field 20 years ago, not everyone likes or gets along with each other —
have decided to make the nerd argument over the Hugos into a decidedly
personal grudge match. Where the objective is to not just win the
argument, but to destroy the arguer. Professionally. In the
marketplace. On the big stage of public opinion. This is the kind of
stuff you ordinarily find in cut-throat national political elections,
but then it’s been clear for years that cut-throat politics have drifted
down into nerd circles of all kinds: comic book circles, movie and
television circles, video game circles, etc. There’s simply no escaping
it. And there are people for whom winning is more important than
ethics, more important than integrity, and more important than the
truth.

And the truth is, I’m not the dastardly guy Biedenharn’s piece makes me out to be. And neither is Larry Correia.

Am I concerned with the infestation of political correctness which
has invaded SF/F over the last 15 years? You bet. Today’s ride on the
media dunking machine was just another iteration in the near-endless
attempts by the politically correct to enforce their views, with slander
and falsehoods when it comes down to it. Our field is diseased. It
has been struck by the same mental virus that has been permeating other
sectors of our culture. As one astute and recovered victim put it, the
new zealots are a cult who dwell in depression and anger, seeking the slightest excuses to lash out and make other people suffer:

There is something dark and vaguely cultish about this
particular brand of politics. I’ve thought a lot about what exactly that
is. I’ve pinned down four core features that make it so disturbing:
dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality, and anti-intellectualism.

Today, the crusader mentality decided to defame and slander Brad R.
Torgersen the evil demonic racist and hateful sick bigoted misognynist. As my friend Larry often quips, if I was half the bastard some of these crusaders say I am, I’d probably hate me too….

But really, when SF/F sinks to this depth, you know we’ve jumped a
certain kind of unfortunate shark. Political correctness has gone to a
place of destructive take-no-prisoners soul tyranny that could very well
and permanently wreck this field; unless good men and women of
conscience decide to stand up. I made the decision a long time ago that
I wasn’t going to be one of those professionals who diplomatically
skulks around the field, obsequiously trying to avoid controversy and
not upset the bigger fish. Again, I’ve seen too much of the elephant.
My career isn’t so important to me that I am willing to become an
ideological chameleon, or cipher. Perhaps this has angered some people
to the point they believe it’s time to “end” Torgersen once and for all?
If so, I think that’s a very sad statement — about the vindictiveness
that has overtaken the genre, among men and women who should probably be
working hard to be friends.

Folks, until or unless political correctness is given the boot, this kind of stuff isn’t going to stop.

It won’t be just me getting the torch. It will be you too. You
other authors, and you other fans. Political correctness has a
bottomless stomach, and is red in tooth and claw. Even if you try to
appease the beast, it will eat you eventually anyway.

Needless to say, I’m a little less surprised. I was openly warned about my sinful nature in the eyes of science fiction’s thought police more than 10 years ago, and attacked by a few of those self-appointed thought police for my thought crimes. They know perfectly well that I don’t care what they call me, so they’re going in search of what they think is easier prey, of people more inclined to give in.

Aren’t they in for a surprise!

Entertainment Weekly libels Sad Puppies

I suspect Isbella Biedenharn is going to be hearing from her superiors shortly:

Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign
by Isabella Biedenharn

The Hugo Awards have fallen victim to a campaign in which misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards. These groups, Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies (both of which are affiliated with last year’s GamerGate scandal), urged sci-fi fans to become members of the Hugo Awards’ voting body, World Science Fiction Convention, in order to cast votes against female writers and writers of color. Membership only costs $40, and allows members to vote for the 2016 nominations as well as the 2015 nominations, which were just released.

Sad Puppies broadcast their selection on Feb. 1, writing: “If you agree with our slate below—and we suspect you might—this is YOUR chance to make sure YOUR voice is heard.” Brad Torgerson, who runs Sad Puppies along with Larry Correia, complains that the Hugo Awards have lately skewed toward “literary” works, as opposed to “entertainment.”

Torgerson also writes that he disagrees with Hugos being awarded for affirmative action-like purposes, as many women and writers of color went home with awards in 2014: ”Likewise, we’ve seen the Hugo voting skew ideological, as Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters.”

The other lobbying group, Rabid Puppies, is run by Theodore Beale (who goes by the name Vox Day). As The Telegraph reports, “Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America have called for Beale’s exclusion from the group after he has written against women’s suffrage and posted racist views towards black writer NK Jemisin.”

Fortunately, some sane voters allowed well-deserving writers to pull through. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword and Listen was nominated for Dramatic Presentation, and Annie Bellet’s Goodnight Stars was nominated, despite having a non-white, female protagonist.

Plenty of members of the science fiction community have voiced their disgust with both sects of “Puppies.” Writer Philip Sandifer wrote on his blog Sunday, “The Hugo Awards have just been successfully hijacked by neofascists.” Sandifer’s post, which is worth reading in full, addresses what this disaster means for the sci-fi world:

    To be frank, it means that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom does not have any legitimacy right now. Period. A community that can be this effectively controlled by someone who thinks black people are subhuman and who has called for acid attacks on feminists is not one whose awards have any sort of cultural validity. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to functional communities. And the fact that it has just happened to the oldest and most venerable award in the sci-fi/fantasy community makes it unambiguously clear that traditional sci-fi/fantasy fandom is not fit for purpose.

As writer Joe Abercrombie put it:

    The Hugo Awards have never looked less like the future of anything.

    — Joe Abercrombie (@LordGrimdark) April 4, 2015

It should be amusing to see the back-pedaling from this malicious hit piece. It’s like they have one tactic: call the media and lie. How fortunate that #GamerGate has demonstrated the complete impotence of the tactic.

UPDATE: They’re scrubbing the article and title, but Daddy Warpig provides the archived original.

CORRECTION: After misinterpreting reports in other news
publications, EW published an unfair and inaccurate depiction of the Sad
Puppies voting slate, which does, in fact, include many women and
writers of color. As Sad Puppies’ Brad Torgerson explained to EW, the
slate includes both women and non-caucasian writers, including Rajnar
Vajra, Larry Correia, Annie Bellet, Kary English, Toni Weisskopf, Ann
Sowards, Megan Gray, Sheila Gilbert, Jennifer Brozek, Cedar Sanderson,
and Amanda Green.
This story has been updated to more accurately reflect this. EW regrets the error.

They left out the only Native American. WHY DO THEY HATE INDIANS?

That’s not funny!

Satire isn’t satire if it’s the wrong satire:

31-year-old comic Trevor Noah was hired to replace Jon Stewart yesterday, and the backlash has already arrived with a vengeance. Noah has a large following in his native South Africa, and has toured extensively abroad, but he isn’t so well-known in the U.S. — to date, he has three Daily Show “correspondent” appearances under his belt — and it’s looking like some of his comedic sensibilities might not find such a warm audience Stateside.
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Noah is mixed-race, with a half-Jewish Xhosa mother and Swiss father, and much of his material centers on the issue of race. However, people have noticed that a slew of of Noah’s tweets — mostly posted in 2012 and prior — include unfunny, questionably offensive jokes about Jews and women.

Clearly Mr. Noah will require a remedial consciousness-raising session or two conducted by professional SJWs instructing him which topics and subjects are acceptable and which are not.

Punch harder

It’s amusing how many SJWs don’t understand how this “Internet” thing works. A woman whines about being criticized by Dalrock, among others.

A group of supposed “Christian” men bantered back and forth under a blog written with the sole intention of saying that women divorce so they can profit off of it by writing about it and I Laura Lifshitz, am one of the most evil women profiting off her dissolved marriage. Oh and by the way, the article is categorized under “ugly feminists.”

First, the comments focused on how terrible I was for writing about my divorce not only for The Huffington Post, but also for the New York Times because you know, the divorce must be my fault since I write about the experience, and I’m an evil Jewish feminist. And not only must the divorce be my fault but that I am a selfish mother who cares not for her own child and how she feels in the matter. In addition, let’s not forget to add that female writers writing about divorce are a bunch of leeches set to destroy our families all in the name of money.

Because, you know, I’m just filthy rich. It’s too bad my student loan lender doesn’t realize this.

Then, the commenters started to focus on my last name: Lifshitz.

“Ha, Ha, Ha! Is it even a real name?” joked one commenter.

Then the other commenters joined in to bash my last name, these anti-Semitic, vile, and immature babies (I mean men).

Now why would anyone be moved to criticize a woman who calls them “anti-Semitic, vile, and immature babies”? What is the bright line that separates a woman calling men “vile and immature babies” and a man calling women “rancid cunts”? And for crying out loud, look at her name. “Is it a real name” is about the mildest possible sport anyone could make of it. As for people getting personal about Ms Lipshits, it’s not hard to see why they might feel justified in doing so:

There is this one dude at the gym who is very buff. He’s not my bag of treats, but apparently he feels that any woman who looks in his direction must be interested. He has this stone face grimace. I see him at least three times a week. Smile you grouchy fuck! I am not interested in you, but I just hate looking at such a crabby face.

Any woman who writes like this has made herself entirely fair game for any verbal abuse anyone wants to pour out upon her. Like the McRapeys and McRacists of the world, she wants to be able to dish out abuse without being subjecting to it in return. Women like this are in shock that men on the Internet aren’t treating them the way that men in their daily life do, and that they can’t get away with talking about others in public the way they do in private.

The thing is, if you’re going to be a public figure and express your opinion on the Internet, you are going to upset a subset of the people who encounter it. A subset of that subset are going to respond by attacking you using nothing but rhetoric. I’ve had people calling me nearly every name in the book on the Internet since 2001. So what? It clearly hasn’t harmed me in the slightest. I quite like that it also gives me complete carte blanche to call everyone else anything I please since it seems to bother most of them considerably more than it bothers me.

The first rule of dealing with SJWs is Andrew Breitbart’s: always punch back twice as hard. The second rule is this: keep punching. Women are particularly susceptible to attacks on their appearance and their sexual behavior, so those are the most effective subjects to target with rhetoric. Once it is clear that they’re not engaging in honest dialectic or rational discourse, your best bet is to either ignore them or nuke them rhetorically.

The third rule is this: quote them and quote them ruthlessly.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden is a self-admitted racist. John Scalzi is a
self-admitted rapist. NK Jemisin is a self-admitted savage… and proud
of it.

The SJWs have to choose. Either they can engage in rational discourse or they can accept being called sluts and savages and racists and evil, ugly feminists on a regular basis. What is not on the table is one-way communication where they attack and lecture us and we humbly accept it in dutiful silence.

There are some things I cannot understand — like internet trolls and
people who hate chocolate — but there is one thing that I do know is
that I will never stop writing. I don’t care if they come to my house
and call me the ugliest cunt on the planet. I will never stop writing my
story.

Oh, I don’t think there was every any chance that Ms Lipshits was going to stop talking about herself. But she can be assured that as long as she subjects the public to her story, the public is going to talk back.

Depression or Sudden Jihad Syndrome?

Contradictory claims are being made about the murderous Germanwings pilot. The more explosive one is that the “significant item” that was found at his apartment was indicative of a conversion to Islam:

According to Michael Mannheimer, a writer for German PI-News, Germany now has its own 9/11, thanks to the convert to Islam, Andreas Lubitz. Translation from German:

All evidence indicates that the copilot of Airbus machine in his six-months break during his training as a pilot in Germanwings, converted to Islam and subsequently either by the order of “radical”, ie. devout Muslims , or received the order from the book of terror, the Quran, on his own accord decided to carry out this mass murder. As a radical mosque in Bremen is in the center of the investigation, in which the convert was staying often, it can be assumed that he – as Mohammed Atta, in the attack against New York – received his instructions directly from the immediate vicinity of the mosque.

Converts are the most important weapon of Islam. Because their resume do not suggests that they often are particularly violent Muslims. Thus Germany now has its own 9/11, but in a reduced form. And so it is clear that Islam is a terrorist organization that are in accordance with §129a of the Criminal Code to prohibit it and to investigate its followers. But nothing will happen. One can bet that the apologists (media, politics, “Islamic Scholars”) will agree to assign this an act of a “mentally unstable” man, and you can bet that now, once again the mantra of how supposedly peaceful Islam is will continue.

Now this sounds a little far-fetched and breathless to me, especially since there were only reports of the pilot breathing, not of any prayers or the customary jihadist battle cry. I’d take it with a grain of salt at the moment. Then again, I’m not sure that any direct statements that the pilot said nothing of any kind have been made. And it is true that claims of his mental instability are already being reported, such as here:

The Germanwings co-pilot who crashed his plane into a mountain killing himself and 149 people on board was receiving psychiatric counselling right up until the crash, it emerged today.

Andreas Lubitz locked the pilot out the of the Airbus A320’s cockpit before setting the plane’s controls to descend into a rocky valley, French prosecutors revealed yesterday.

As well as having been signed off from training with depression in 2008, it was reported this morning that Lubitz had continued to receive mental health support up until this week’s crash.

German newspaper Bild also reported that the 28-year-old was in the middle of the ‘relationship crisis’ with his girlfriend in the weeks before the crash and may have been struggling to cope with a break-up.

It was claimed this morning that the couple were engaged to be married next year.

New information about Lubitz’s life emerged just hours after police investigating the disaster began a four-hour search of his flat, which he is said to have shared with a girlfriend. Officers refused to reveal details of what they have found but have insisted no suicide note had been recovered.

The two things that are slightly strange here are a) the refusal to reveal any details of what has been found, except the statement that something was “significant”. Of course, that could be anything from a Koran to the dead body of his ex-girlfriend. The other thing that is strange is that in all the previous reports, there was no indication of a girlfriend of any kind. For example, he was reported to have taken a trip to a resort with a male friend, the sort of trip I have never known any man to take except with a wife or girlfriend.

And, of course, given the growing strength of PEGIDA, we know the German authorities will be desperate to keep any indication of Lubitz being a Mahometan convert under wraps.

SJWs take a scalp

The British SJWs at the BBC finally managed to bring down Jeremy Clarkson:

The BBC bosses have always been partisans of whatever ideology was the most elitist, the most sanctimonious, the most anti-public, in any given age: in the 60s and 70s it was full of communists, today it is full of Politically-correct Progressives. They are almost always Leftist, always Collectivist, and almost always humorless.

And the BBC’s mid-level bureaucrats have always, always hated Top Gear. The current BBC’s manager, Danny Cohen, had been very vocal about how desperate he was to get rid of Jeremy Clarkson, and now he got his wish. In the process, it made a pretty startling revelation as to how Collectivists work, and who they serve.

When it was announced that the BBC was using a dinnertime argument as an excuse to fire (or “sack” as they say across the pond) the driving force behind Top Gear, two big petitions were being promoted across the social media almost instantly. The first was in support of Clarkson, demanding that the BBC not fire him; it ended up with over a million signatures and became the fastest-growing petition in the history of change.org. The second demanded that Clarkson be fired for his various crimes against humanity (which mostly consisted of being anti-Europe, anti-Left, anti-nanny-state, and anti-political-correctness). This petition garnered a whopping 34127 signatures. It featured, in brazen shamelessness, a completely un-ironic picture of Clarkson with his mouth gagged on it, making it very clear what these people wanted: to totally silence those who disagree with them.

This is an interesting result for two reasons. First, it gives us a very good, albeit non-scientific, look at just what the divide between the Collectivist elitists and the Individualists is: the Collectivist-Crowd made up about 3.2% of the population who signed either petition. These are the people who are strident in their advocacy of the Collectivist values of the modern “progressive” Left, that believe in pogroms against free speech; but more importantly, that will despise anything just because everyday people like it too much.

Clarkson’s case is actually quite similar to mine with the SFWA, despite the fact that considerably more people care about the former than the latter. When the SJWs are gunning for you, they will immediately grasp at any excuse, no matter how trivial, to at least try to get rid of you. It’s something you must always keep in mind once you understand that you’re being targeted by these vicious, spiteful little people. They can’t handle power and they’re control freaks, so perspective means nothing whatsoever to them.

So, don’t think that they won’t, and if you’re at all interested in keeping your position, you must avoid handing them the ammunition they are so avidly seeking. Of course, if you don’t give a damn, then don’t worry about it, accept the inevitable when it comes, draw the process out as long as you can, and thereby permit the world to clearly see exactly what sort of lunatics they are.

Interview with Vox Day

Sam Roberts at Reaxxion interviewed me about the game industry, the SJW attack on it, and our upcoming plans for First Sword:

SR: Many commentators, at our site and elsewhere, have noticed the sudden outbreak of prudishness in the gaming industry. We saw this with PAX and its ban on booth babes, even to the point of specifying a minimum length for girl’s skirts. Even Mortal Kombat, the franchise that established itself in the 1990’s through its willingness to break all the rules, is moving to “more realistic” characters with smaller breasts and thicker waists. What do you think has changed in the gaming industry in the past 20 years that’s made it so much less able to resist moral scolds?

VD: The most important change is that game development no longer belongs to the mavericks. When we started Fenris Wolf in 1993, literally everyone thought we were crazy. We were throwing away good jobs and wasting our educations to do what people considered to be the equivalent of playing with digital Lincoln Logs. Now that games are widely understood to be big business, many of the jobs pay decent salaries, and you can get degrees in “game development” and “game design,” you have considerably more risk-intolerant, conflict-avoidant people entering the industry.

Twenty years ago, the average developer would have laughed his ass off at the idea that he should design or develop anything other than whatever the hell he wanted to do. These days, there are a fair number of bed-wetters in game development who are terrified at the idea that someone, somewhere, might take offense at something in one of their games. And then, of course, you’ve also got SJWs trying to stick their noses into the industry in order to change it, just as they did in comics and science fiction & fantasy fiction.

You’ll definitely want to check out the screenshots of the 3DV engine in action. Be sure to click on the image of the High Elven archers. 3DV is visually spectacular and is intended to do for miniature gaming what VASSAL did for board-and-counter games. In addition to various other topics addressed, you can also see our response to the SJW demands for more women in games, beginning with the introduction to Morwyn Shadowsong, a female elf gladiator who is the face of First Sword, the fantasy gladiator miniatures game.

It probably won’t take a genius to put two and two together and realize that the Tactical Uncertainty model I’m developing, which has been discussed in some detail over at Castalia, is intended for the third edition of Striker that Marc Miller has asked me to develop. The rules will be developed for use in 3DV and on the tabletop alike; the challenge is how to make something that works almost automatically in the former can be translated to the latter. With regards to some of the other games mentioned, we will have some exciting new announcements soon.

Wearing Murdoch’s leash

Fox News may be better than the ABCNNBCBS cabal, but don’t ever mistake them for the good guys, or even being reliably pro-American. And they do NOT like criticism coming from the nationalist right:

The blogger Mickey Kaus has quit his job at The Daily Caller after the conservative site’s editor-in-chief, Tucker Carlson, pulled a critical column about Fox News from the site, Kaus told the On Media blog on Tuesday.

“It’s pretty simple,” Kaus said in an interview, “I wrote a piece attacking Fox for not being the opposition on immigration and amnesty — for filling up the airwaves with reports on ISIS and terrorism, and not fulfilling their responsibility of being the opposition on amnesty and immigration…. I posted it at 6:30 in the morning. When I got up, Tucker had taken it down. He said, ‘We can’t trash Fox on the site. I work there.'”

Carlson, who co-founded The Daily Caller in 2010, is a conservative contributor to Fox News and the host of its weekend edition of “Fox & Friends.”

Kaus says when he told Carlson he needed to be able to write about Fox, Carlson told him it was a hard-and-fast rule, and non-negotiable.

“He said it was a rule, and he wouldn’t be able to change that rule. So I told him I quit,” Kaus explained. “I just don’t see how you can put out a publication with that kind of giant no-go area. It’s not like we’re owned by Joe’s Muffler Shop, so we just can’t write about Joe’s Muffler shop.”

This is entirely par for the Fox News course. Ten years ago I was writing a book called Media Whores that was signed to Thomas Nelson. The executives were very upset when they discovered that it wasn’t only about the media whores of the Left, but contained chapters about Michelle Malkin and Bill O’Reilly as well.

The official line about the sudden cancellation was that the book wasn’t expected to sell well enough to justify the marketing. However, I was told by someone inside the organization, who was definitely in a position to know what really happened, that the outline and sample chapters I’d provided were shown to Fox, who indicated that they would prefer that it was not published. So, the book was duly canceled six weeks after the contract was signed, although I did get paid for it.

This was not my only experience of this variety. And perhaps you’ll understand that my disregard for mainstream publishers is not entirely rooted in my disdain for the SJW gatekeepers in SF/F.