Tag: media

The downside of disruption

Game Developer goes the way of Computer Gaming World:

Had I written this editorial two weeks earlier, I’d probably be writing about how enthusiastic I am to introduce our first-ever mobile-themed issue. In the past few years, mobile games have grown into a part of the industry no developer can afford to ignore, and the fact that Game Developer hasn’t ever devoted an entire issue to the topic until now is rather shortsighted on our part.

Then I found out that Game Developer’s parent company UBM Tech was axing all its print publications. That’s right – if you haven’t already heard, Game Developer’s last official issue is the next one (June-July). Stick around for it; it’s gonna be good.

Interesting timing, as I just happened to hear from the immortal Dr. Johnny Wilson last week. I still very much miss the old CGW from its glory days of the early and mid-1990s.  I used to read that thing from cover to cover the moment it arrived in the mail. And I’m still looking for that 1993(?) issue that Mike Weksler wrote about 3D graphics about me and Chris Taylor; if anyone has a copy of it somewhere or can even ID the issue, I would appreciate it.

I can’t say I’ll miss Game Developer anywhere nearly as much, but it was a good magazine, even if occasionally a little too much given to articles stating the total obvious by lesser developers and idiotic demands for more transgendered and Esquimaux developers.  But it is still a loss to the game development world, and demonstrates what too often happens when a small company, successful in its niche, sells out to a larger corporation.

Halfway to reality

Emily Asher-Perrin fails to think the matter all the way through:

Never mind the chainmail bikinis—what about those awkward breast plates
in armor that we see frequently in fantasy artwork and at the Ren Faire?
Whenever women complain about this convention, they are usually shot
down for trying to erase women’s true bodies, for insisting that women
make themselves more “male” in order to appear strong and capable…. Let’s begin by stating the simple purpose of plate armor—to deflect
blows from weaponry. Assuming that you are avoiding the blow of a sword,
your armor should be designed so that the blade glances off your body,
away from your chest. If your armor is breast-shaped, you are in fact
increasing the likelihood that a blade blow will slide inward, toward
the center of your chest, the very place you are trying to keep safe.

But that’s not all! Let’s say you even fall onto your boob-conscious
armor. The divet separating each breast will dig into your chest, doing
you injury. It might even break your breastbone. With a strong enough
blow to the chest, it could fracture your sternum entirely, destroying
your heart and lungs, instantly killing you. It is literally a death
trap—you are wearing armor that acts as a perpetual spear directed at
some of your most vulnerable body parts. It’s just not smart.

 That’s not to say that female armor cannot be shaped differently—in fact, it should be to account for differences in shoulder-to-waist ratios and more, as the military recently discovered. Some films decide to provide women with a shelf of sorts in the chest region and that choice, if well-designed, can be flattering as well as functional. But it still isn’t logical or necessary by a longshot.

So if you want to wear some sculpted armor to the Ren Faire because you feel fabulous-looking in it, go forth and have fun! But if you’re drawing lady soldiers, or creating female characters who are depicted as actual warriors, please err on the side of reality when designing their armor. Science says your boob plates are killing the women you hoped they would protect.

Of course, if we’re going to start bringing reality into swords and sorcery, we should probably also take into consideration the fact that even a large, well-trained woman couldn’t last thirty seconds against the average warrior.  The correct and realistic portrayal of an armor-era woman is either one who is dead and buried after her brief foray into warrior womanhood or at home, caring for the children that she started bearing in her teens.

Awkward and combat-inefficient breast plates are the least of the problem. What it is time to retire is the absurd and ahistorical “warrior woman”.

The amusing thing is that throughout the comments, no one even stops to realize that the entire premise of women attempting to fight with swords is physically ridiculous.  If you doubt me, just hand a sword to the closest woman the next time you’re in a medieval museum.

Death of the Republican blogosphere

Instapundit, John Hawkins, and a number of right-wing bloggers consider why some consider the right-wing blogosphere to be on the decline:

[A] funny thing happened in 2002-2003 — the left side of the
blogosphere took off and eclipsed the Right side of the blogosphere.
Liberals ferociously loathed George W. Bush, just as conservatives had
detested Clinton, and they went online to congregate and get the
information they needed to fight back. Soon, the liberal blogs were
considerably bigger than the conservative blogs….although, and this is
an often overlooked caveat, there were still a number of significant
conservative websites, with large audiences, that many people don’t
consider to be “blogs:” Lucianne, The American Spectator, WorldnetDaily, Newsmax, etc.

So, since that was the case, when Barack Obama got into power, you’d
have expected that traffic on the Right side of the blogosphere would
have surged just as it did on the Left side of the blogosphere in the
early Bush years.

That didn’t happen.

Sure, there were a few outliers that took off: Hot Air, Redstate, and the Breitbart empire
for example, but most conservative blogs have either grown
insignificantly, stayed the same size, or even shrank. Most bloggers on
the right side of the blogosphere haven’t increased their traffic
significantly in years. Moreover, the right side of the blogosphere as a
whole is definitely shrinking in numbers as bloggers that have had
trouble getting traction are quitting and fewer and fewer bloggers are
starting up new blogs.

And Legal Insurrection laments the link-stinginess of the corporate blogs that have largely taken over both Left and Right alike.

I wish the reality weren’t so true that the days of collaboration and mutual support are waning. It’s nearly impossible to get a link out of the new big names in
conservative media.  It’s not even a conservative blogosphere anymore,
it’s for-profit and non-profit corporate media which are protective of
eyeballs.

I think there are several problems.  The first is the increased amount of corporatization among the blogosphere. Pajamas Media is the primary culprit here, but Gawker Media is also to blame. Once Nick Denton and Roger Simon showed that it was possible to monetize a blog or ten, pecuniary interests rapidly came to the fore. Suddenly everything had a price tag, links were worth money, and everyone’s behavior naturally became just a bit more self-centered and mercenary.  The H/T soon went the way of the dodo.

And everyone became increasingly afraid of offending the bigger dogs and getting cut off from the all-important link flow. For example, I used to be a regular guest on the Northern Alliance Radio Show. That stopped not long after I criticized Michelle Malkin for her shoddy research failure and thereby offended the Powerline guys, even though I remained on good terms with the Fraters Libertas.  I suspect this desire to curry favor is why the outliers that took off in terms of popularity have so little chili; they’re basically the blogosphere equivalent of the mainstream media whores.  Face it, Dana Loesch isn’t any smarter now that she’s a Breitbart bimbo than she was when she called herself Mamalogues(TM) and I was kicking her around in response to her various lunacies.

An even more important factor is the sapping of right-wing energy by thirteen straight years of relentless betrayal of conservative principles by the Republican Party. Libertarian realists like me are still going strong, since we never expected any better, but how much enthusiasm can conservatives expect to muster in support of nominal leaders like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney?  The political enthusiasm simply isn’t there anymore.  It’s not so much the right-wing blogosphere that is dying as the Republican one.

It may be worth noting that the Right also tends to fear controversy and mainstream criticism far more than the Left, not always without cause.  I’m a bit more controversial than the average blogger, and as a result, have an unusually small number of incoming links in relation to the readership.  Consider this fact: McRapey’s Whatever has between 30 to 40 percent less traffic than VP+AG these days, but Alexa shows 4,713 incoming links there, nearly 3,500 more than VP’s 941 and AG’s 315.  I’m not complaining. I’m  clear that readers will find their way here whether they are encouraged by others to do so or not. But the difference is noticeable.

Being an aggregator, Instapundit is one of the few bloggers who still links religiously to others. I’ve attempted to follow his example and I never cite any information from any blog without linking directly to it. But I don’t really bother with a blogroll per se anymore, because I have neither the time nor the interest to keep track of them as they spring up, post for a few months, or even a few weeks, and then fade away. 

These days, if someone sends me an email enthusiastically informing me that they have just launched a new blog and would love to exchange links, I don’t even bother to reply anymore.  I’ve seen far too many new blogs begin with a few enthusiastic posts, followed soon after by an apology for not having the time to post but promising that will change real soon now, then a last hurrah, after which comes the void. Blogging isn’t for everyone, but it usually requires trying it in order to learn whether it suits you or not… but I would recommend not requesting links from anyone until you’ve proven that you can do it for at least one year.

I think the corporatization of blogs makes independent that much more important, even if it is less common and less popular than it once was.  Otherwise, we might as all sit around and watch the three television stations permitted to us by our masters in the media.

Jesus loves you. God, probably not so much.

Comedians, gay rights activists, and “accomplished journalists” are probably not the right people to consult when you wish to contemplate Christian theology. Meanwhile, the New York Times slanders millions of Christians by falsely and absurdly misrepresenting both their faith and their attitude towards a particular group of notoriously unrepentant sinners.
The crowd laughs a little nervously when Minchin, an outspoken atheist,
begins to sing, “I love Jesus, I love Jesus.” They bought tickets to a
comedy show, not a religious revival. Minchin prompts the audience to
join him. “Who do you love?” he asks. “Sing it!” Soon the whole crowd is
singing “I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” along with Minchin, in a video
that has been viewed half a million times on YouTube. 
Then Minchin changes the lyrics: “I love Jesus, I hate faggots,” he
sings. “I love Jesus, I hate faggots.” The crowd stops singing along.
Minchin looks up from his guitar, pretending not to understand what the
problem could be. 
“What happened? I just lost you there,” Minchin says. He makes a
halfhearted attempt to get the singalong going again before giving up.
“Ah, well,” he shrugs. “Maybe these are ideas best shared in churches.” 
Those ideas — loving Jesus means hating gay people — are proclaimed in
Christian churches and on Christian television and radio broadcasts. The
combined efforts of the Family Research Council, the National
Organization for Marriage, “The 700 Club,” the United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops, the Westboro Baptist Church, and countless
conservative Christian activists, preachers and politicians have
succeeded in making antigay bigotry seem synonymous with Christianity. 
This can cause a lot of heartache — with sometimes devastating
consequences — for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender children born
into fundamentalist or evangelical Christian families. Such was the case
for Jeff Chu, the author of “Does Jesus Really Love Me? A Gay
Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America.” Chu is an
accomplished journalist who recently married his male partner. But Chu’s
mother, a devout Baptist, didn’t attend her son’s wedding. She still
cries herself to sleep every night, Chu writes, tormented by the
certainty that her gay son is “lost.” 
As a child, Chu adored the song “Jesus Loves Me.” But does Jesus love
him now that he’s an openly gay adult? Chu has his doubts: “There are
still moments when I wonder whether my homosexuality is my ticket to
hell.”

Does Jesus still love Chu? Absolutely.  Does God hate those who refuse to repent of their abomination?  We have a strong Biblical basis for asserting that, given how many times we are told He hates the wicked.  It isn’t Chu’s homosexuality that is his ticket to Hell, it is his refusal to repent of his sin and his refusal to permit Jesus Christ to stand in his stead in the time of judgment.

We are all sinners. The very last thing I want is to have to stand behind my personal permanent record and be judged by it.  I want my official record, as far as God’s judgment is concerned, to be that of history’s only sinless man.  The proper question with which one should be concerned isn’t whether Jesus loves one or not, but whether God does.

This piece is as trivial as it is slanderous.  It is not “antigay bigotry” to claim that unrepentant sinners who not only glory in their sin, but define themselves by it, are headed straight for the eternal incinerator, especially if Hell does not exist.  If I were to say that homosexuals are all destined to be raped by unicorns and leprechauns, no one would consider it bigotry.  This is mere rhetoric, intended to modify Christian behavior to the liking of those who hate Christianity by a transparent attempt at emotional manipulation.

Either unrepentant homosexuals are Hell-bound or they are not.  No amount of touchy-feely Churchian welcomism will change that either way.  And to the extent that the wicked are welcomed into the Church without being warned of the need to repent, the Church is failing in its Christian duty.  Homosexuality, like almost every other sin, can be forgiven. But before forgiveness can be granted, there must be repentance.

Liberals always love to cite the example of the adulterous woman spared stoning by Jesus asking who will cast the first stone.  And they always leave off the vital conclusion, where Jesus tells the woman to “go and sin no more”.

The wickedness of the homosexual community can be seen in its corrosive effect on others.  Consider this passage in light of the requirement Jesus laid upon his followers:

After Benjamin Sullivan-Knoff came out to his parents in his sophomore
year of high school, his mother begged her son not to do so publicly.
She was working as an associate pastor at a conservative church — an
Evangelical Covenant Church — and she feared she would be fired if her
son came out. A few months later she reversed herself, asked for her
son’s forgiveness and gave him her blessing to come out. “I love this
denomination,” Eva Sullivan-Knoff tells Chu, “but I love my son more.”

She loves her son more than her denomination, which is fine. But she has revealed that she is no Christian disciple, she cannot be, as per the words of Jesus Christ himself.


“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and
wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.”
– Luke 14:26

Christianity is not the easy way.  It is the hard way. We forget that at our peril. And to those Churchians and non-Christians who would attempt to argue with the points presented here, I have a single question: precisely what sins beside homosexual fornication did Jesus Christ declare a man did not need to repent in order to be saved?

Don’t trust the media

Joe Blow explains why:

The Smartest Attorney I Have Ever Known (SAIHEK) is a former White House Counsel. He tells the story of when the NY Times approached him about writing an essay defending a Bush 41 or maybe a Reagan policy. He asked, “you’re not going to get me to do all this work, then give it to an op-ed writer who will write something debunking this, then not publish my essay, are you? Because you guys did that to ______ and he told me about it.”

“No, of course not,” the NY Times editor said. “We’d never.”

So the SAIHEK, a guy who should have known better, spent several hours out of a couple very busy days where he really didn’t have several hours to give, writing a cracking essay defending Administration policy. He faxed it to the Times. He waited several days and was thinking about calling the editor, when he happened to open the Sunday Times, and there was an op-ed thoroughly hammering the Administration policy. There were several arguments in it, and each was a clever rebuttal to the arguments of the SAIHEK. They were even in the order that they’d be written, if they were directly in response to the order of the Smartest Attorney & etc.’s op-ed. He didn’t bother calling the editor back because he presumed he’d be told they never got the fax.

As the SAIEK puts it, “I learned a very important and highly sophisticated lesson from that experience. Don’t trust the media.”

It is amazing how many intelligent people who know the media is not on their side readily fall for this sort of thing.  I turned down several requests to appear on Alan Colmes’s show a few years ago after I wrote certain columns that proved to be controversial because I knew that I would only be there to serve as cannon fodder. At the time, my media jujitsu was insufficiently developed to permit me to go on a national show with the confidence that I could get my points across no matter how the host tried to spin things.

The thing to always keep in mind is that the media are two-faced and shamelessly dishonest.  They always smile and act friendly when they are hunting for a get.  They are friendly right up until the moment that the microphone goes live, at which point everything changes.  Their voice, their demeanor, even the look in their eyes is transformed.  And if you betray any sign of weakness, they are very good at identifying and exploiting it to rhetorical effect.

This is why so many guests on various news shows so often look bewildered and taken aback when they are being interviewed.  You are seeing, or hearing, the guest’s first introduction to the media figure with their attack face on.  They’ve been told how interesting their thoughts are, how fascinated the viewers or listeners will find them, and how much the media figure has wanted to discuss this with them.  They’ll be assured that it is not a hostile interview, not at all.  And then, the moment the red light goes on, the mask drops.

However, if you are sufficiently prepared and you understand their tendencies, you can use their instinct to attack perceived weaknesses against them. As Jill once pointed out, they are binary thinkers, and binary thinkers are the easiest people to manipulate no matter how smart they are.  The key is that they are superficial and limited to rhetoric so they have neither depth nor the ability to distinguish between real and false dialectical weaknesses.  Get them lunging for X, and then you have them by simply showing X to be Not-X.  And the more controversial or outrageous to PC sensibilities X happens to appear, the more irresistible they find the lure.

Remember, the media game is all about perceived credibility as opposed to the real thing.  They are in the business of producing rabbit food.

Get the f— off Facebook

Seriously, do it now. Otherwise, you may as well be running your every family activity by the local, state, and Federal police and asking them for permission:

New Jersey police and Dept. of Children and Families officials raided the home of a firearms instructor and demanded to see his guns after he posted a Facebook photo of his 11-year-old son holding a rifle.

“Someone called family services about the photo,” said Evan Nappen, an attorney representing Shawn Moore. “It led to an incredible, heavy-handed raid on his house. They wanted to see his gun safe, his guns and search his house. They even threatened to take his kids.”

If you’re still posting pictures of your family and your children on Facebook, you are a complete and unmitigated idiot.  It was one thing to do it before it became clear how Facebook would be utilized, it’s another thing to continue doing it now.  These days, the only thing you should be posting on Facebook is disinformation.

Owning the room

Simon Evans is awesome. “My accent may be rather unfamiliar, possibly even rather exotic to some of you. If you are struggling to place it, it is, in fact, educated.”

70,000 readers per day!

One thing you have to keep in mind when dealing with the Left is that
leftists very seldom tell the truth about anything.  They depend upon misleading others.  That is why, if you notice a leftist is putting
particular stress on something, that is a glowing-red, beeping signal
that if you look a little closer, you’ll discover that whatever they are claiming is, if not entirely false, at least somewhat exaggerated.

Item 1: Rachel Maddow.  “A
poster on Twitter, upon seeing what he thought were very similar posts
referencing MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s show, did some searching and
found out that Maddow has been using phony twitter accounts to boost her
“mentions” on the popular website.  As can be seen by screenshots
collected by a tweeter named @LeftyBollocks, Maddow has massive amount
of accounts posting the exact same claim that “Confession: I yell at my
TV while watching Rachel #Maddow talk about filibuster reform in the
same way most people do during football.”

Item 2: John Scalzi.   “Handily
demolishing the burger that he had chosen over a Midtown restaurant’s
fancier Mediterranean fare, Mr. Scalzi was anything but grim; he smiled
readily and giggled heartily. He is comfortable with the business of
promotion: An affable speaker, he is familiar with the patois of fandom
and is adept at generating buzz through the nerd mafia of like-minded
collaborators. He already reaches up to 50,000 readers a day through his
popular blog, “Whatever.” (“Taunting the tauntable since 1998” is the
slogan on its home page.)”

Item 3: 2012 Nebula Awards.  The SFWA Nebula ballots went out today.  As usual, Tor had 2 of the 6 nominations for Best Novel, but as Tor’s defenders are quick to point out, that could be accounted for by the fact that it publishes the most novels in the increasingly mislabeled field of “science fiction”.  However, even more questionable is the fact that three of the seven Best Novelette nominees were published on Tor.com, which is one fewer nomination than Asimov, Analog, F&SF, and Black Gate received for all short fiction combined.  Another apparent anomaly was that two writers, Aliette de Bodard and Kenneth Liu, received five nominations between them for the three shorter fiction awards, up from three last year.  Now, it would appear that either the two writers are the second comings of Asimov and Heinlein who will dominate the field of science fiction for decades to come or there is something else at work here.

The numerate among us
will recognize that 50,000 readers per day is 18.25 million readers per
year.  Now recall that McRapey was more than a little pleased to have hit 8.2 million in 2012,
up from 5.4 million in 2011.  That 8.2 million refers to
Wordpress views that amount to 7.8 million in Google pageview terms.  Now to
demonstrate how absurd that shows the “50,000 readers a day” claim to be, note that two months into 2013 I am presently right on pace to hit 25,309,493 readers
in 2013 by the NYT metric.  That’s 69,341 daily, which rounds nicely up
to 70,000 readers per day!

How seriously would
you take me if I claimed I had up to 70,000 readers per day?  That’s
precisely how seriously you should take any the posturing of any left-winger
about his popularity, his influence, or even his “bestselling” status, said the three-time Billboard top 40 recording artist.

These examples demonstrate why you should never,
ever give anyone on the Left even the smallest benefit of the doubt.  They always, at
the very least, stretch the truth.  They sockpuppet.  They pretend to
read things they have not.  They claim to have bought things they have
never seen.  They claim to have published three books when they have
only published one.  This reliable pattern of left-wing dishonesty is why I don’t
hesitate to call out fake reviewers and point out apparent shenanigans
even before I have gathered the incontrovertible and conclusive proof; experience and pattern
recognition have taught me that where there is the smoke of anomalies
and numbers not adding up, there is usually the fire of someone who is
“comfortable with the business of promotion” and “adept at generating
buzz”.

It is always unwise to place any trust whatsoever in those who live by attempting to redefine reality through their lies.

An addition to my platform

[Redacted due to a violation of SFWA Forum policies, which forbids both quoting and paraphrasing of Forum discussions.  Also, I should mention that I was in error in assuming that a question on the Forum was directed at me; it was directed at another individual’s post that I did not see.  My apologies to the questioner.]

If I win I will form a committee consisting of one author from each major publisher, who will be charged with discussing the issue with their publisher and receiving either a confirmation or a denial that the publisher has engaged in “bestseller campaigns” via bulk-buying or other methods.  What will be done with that information will be up to the membership, but at least they will be informed as to the facts of the situation.

Anyhow, it struck me that the problem of the appearance of corruption in science fiction and fantasy might have an easy solution.  Since Tor and its authors appear to be inordinately focused on seeing their names on bestseller lists and being nominated for awards, why not give them exactly what they want?  The SFWA can give out two Best Novel awards, one for Best Novel and another for Best Tor Novel.  That way, all the Tor writers can take turns giving each other awards, which is pretty much what they already do anyhow, and all the other books published in the genre can be considered on their literary merits. This would likely result in the genre’s best writers, such as Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross, and China Mieville, finally having a reasonable chance of winning and thereby legitimizing the Nebula awards again.

The alternative is for the organization to continue to hand out Nebula awards for Best Science Fiction Novel to parodies of Regency romances and thereby looking increasingly insane, until McRapey finally wins one for his historic “reboot” of John Norman, Cisgenders of Gor.

As for the bestseller campaigns, I have a solution there too.  Because the NYT is desperate for cash, it can surely be convinced to create a new SFWA Bestsellers category to which the various SF/F publishers can subscribe and be charged a moderate subscription fee.  Different slots will be sold each month, and the publisher can place whatever title he wants each week in the slots he owns that month.  Everyone can become a “New York Times Bestselling author” whether their books come anywhere close to the top 100-selling books or not, and the publishers can slap “New York Times Bestseller” on every book they publish.  Everyone is happy, everyone wins!

Two brilliant solutions.  Frankly, I’ll be shocked if they don’t elect me dictator-for-life.  Also, given what I am told about the vital importance of these lists, I should appreciate it if every reference to me in the future includes “TwoThree-time Billboard Top 40 Recording Artist”.

On the radio

I was on Brian Greenberg’s Philadelphia radio show last night, where we talked all about McRapey, and how terribly persecuted I am, and how bravely and ingeniously I’ve handled being persecuted, and how my books aren’t derivative ripoffs AT ALL.  It was a very courageous performance by me and I feel much better about myself now that my feelings have been affirmed by a sympathetic media figure.

You’re going to want to hear it, because I also gave some important hints about my totally all-original next book!  That’s right, you can squee now!  Here’s a hint: my inspiration rhymes with Why Zack Does Improv and it’s a “reboot” of a certain science fiction classic, only instead of predicting the collapse of the Galactic Empire, Mary Spelltown proves mathematically that by switching over to a matriarchal system of rule by lesbian Empresses of color, the Empire will become even more vibrant and fabulous and fair, thanks to the invisible guidance of a secret dance club of mutant, mind-reading, mixed-race homosexuals that is founded by the brilliant, (and woman!) hard scientist.

And here is the best part.  They communicate by farting!  That’s right.  You may as well pencil in my 2014 Nebula Award for Best Tor Novel right now!