#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
On last night’s Arkhaven Nights, JDA, the Legend, and I were reviewing the script of the cancelled Buffy revival. It was bad. It was very, very bad. To describe it as excruciatingly bad would not be exaggerating.
It was so bad that I don’t think we can rule it out as the culprit in Xander’s untimely death.
‘Buffy’ Actor Nicholas Brendon Dead At 54
RIP Xander.
Scott Adams, creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip, has died following a battle with metastatic prostate cancer. He was 68. Members of The Scott Adams School (formerly called Coffee With Scott Adams) shared the news of Adams’ death on Tuesday.
He was one of the greatest cartoonists and commentators on the corpocracy who ever lived. His legacy will live on. And if we regret his ill-fated bet on trusting science and the scientific consensus, even there, he taught us a very important life lesson.
Jellybean Johnson, the legendary drummer best known for co-founding Prince’s band The Time, has died. Johnson, who played alongside Morris Day in The Time and later the Original 7ven, passed away on Friday, just two days after celebrating his 69th birthday. A trailblazer of the Minneapolis Sound, Johnson helped shape the funky, rock-tinged soul movement that dominated the 1970s and ‘80s.
I think it would amuse some of the old legends to know that the sound they created not only lives on, but is known around the world to the professionals of today.
A few months ago, one English audio engineer, upon hearing one of my more funk-infused, bass-driven mixes, commented: “it really surprised me, and then I remembered that you’re from Minneapolis.”
The legends move on, but the sound remains.
There can be little doubt that the recently deceased Lostprophets singer is not resting in peace, but rather, burning in Hell.
Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins has died after being attacked in jail, prison sources have confirmed.
The disgraced rock star from Pontypridd was serving a 29-year sentence at HMP Wakefield for child sex offences. West Yorkshire Police said they were called to the prison on Saturday morning to an assault on a prisoner, who was pronounced dead at the scene. Watkins, 48, was jailed in December 2013 for a string of child sex offences, including the attempted rape of a baby.
He was attacked with a knife by another inmate, PA reported, citing sources.
I quite liked Lostprophets back in the day. They had several really good songs. And while I never consciously decided to stop listening to them after Watkins’s arrest for some incredibly awful child abuse, I simply never really wanted to hear the man’s voice again. Apparently his bandmates felt much the same, as they decided to shut down the band in the aftermath of his arrest and conviction.
The fall of Ian Watkins into utter depravity is a reminder that no matter how much worldly success one has, it will never be satisfying and it will never be enough, so chasing it is an obvious fool’s game from the start.
Or rather, what one hopes will turn out to be the attempted assassination of Conservative Inc.’s current spokesman.
Shots have been fired at a Charlie Kirk event at Utah Valley University in Orem. Footage from the scene showed eventgoers screaming as shots rang out on Wednesday. The conservative firebrand, 31, was reportedly shot in the neck area at the Turning Point USA event Wednesday, according to bystander accounts.
If the orcs and goblins of Clown World are going after the cuckservatives, it’s probably best for genuine nationalists to stay frosty and stay very far away from public speaking events on college campuses… which is not exactly a problem.
If Charlie dies, this may prove to be the first shot fired in Round Two. It should be noted that the Right didn’t start it. It’s far too soon to know what the eventual impact will be, but it would not be surprising if Charlie Kirk’s death also marks the end of the moderate Right.
UPDATE: The man arrested appears to be a 60-something liberal Boomer. But he may not be the shooter.
UPDATE: MSNBC just speculated the Charlie Kirk shooting could have “been a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration.”
UPDATE: He didn’t make it. Requiescat in pace. Charlie Kirk was 31 years old.
Wrestling superstar Hulk Hogan has died, his manager confirmed. He was 71.
Hogan, whose given name is Terry Bollea, attained pro wrestling stardom in the 1980s and 1990s and was perhaps the biggest star in WWE’s five-decade history. He was the main draw for the first-ever WrestleMania in 1985 and was a fixture for years in its signature event, facing everyone from Andre The Giant and Randy Savage to The Rock and even company chairman Vince McMahon.
He won six WWE championships and was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005 by Sylvester Stallone.
Legendary Elder Scrolls creator Julian LeFay passes away at 59. Julian LeFay, the designer largely credited with helping shape the vision of fan favorite Elder Scrolls franchise, has passed away at the age of 59.
This is a hard one to hear. I was friends with Bennie for years, and it will probably surprise a lot of people to learn that we even worked together for 18 months on what was supposed to be a launch title for the Sega Dreamcast.
He left Bethesda to come work for Fenris Wolf after we signed a $1.5 million deal with Sega to provide its first RPG for its new Katana system after our original producer at GT moved to Sega of America and made signing us one of his first orders of business. I’d licensed the rights to Traveller from Marc Miller, and Julian was not only tired of working at Bethesda after his friend Vijay had left for Microsoft, but was very excited to take his innovative design concepts into a science fiction space for the first time.
And, of course, he liked the idea of working with me and my partner, as we’d hung out together at various CGDCs and E3s for four or five years by that point. He, Vijay, Bobby Prince from id, and Carter from Spectrum Holobyte were the people I spent the most time with at the Westin and the various other locations outside of the CGW crew.
Unfortunately, Sega of Japan eliminated Sega of America and cancelled all ten launch titles that SOA had in development, including ours, about one year prior to the launch of the Dreamcast, in favor of spending the $100 million that had been budgeted for those games on putting the Dreamcast logo on the front of the Arsenal FC jerseys. This was, of course, a terrible decision that was much-mocked in the industry, and helped contribute to the failure of the Dreamcast to compete with the original Sony PlayStation despite its technical superiorities.
I still remember Julian, Kurt (from SOA) and I laughing about the fake headline in a parody newsletter given out at CGDC that read: “SEGA REFUSES TO REVEAL PLANS FOR SELF-IMMOLATION” or something to that effect. It wasn’t quite so funny when I got the phone call from Kurt telling me that a) he had been let go, b) SOA was being shut down by SOJ, and c) Traveller was canceled. In retrospect, that was the beginning of the end for my time in the game industry, as GT’s collapse followed Sega of America’s by about 18 months.
So Julian and I never finished our game. We talked once or twice about possibly working together, and I think he ended up getting back together with Vijay toward the end, but things never managed to quite work out. It’s truly a pity, because I think that what we could have – what we WOULD have – achieved would have been truly epic, in fact, more epic than Epic.
It is truly the end of an era. Julian LeFay is gone, but he should never be forgotten by the gaming community. He never received the plaudits of Richard Garriott, John Romero, or Sid Meier, but he was genuinely one of the great designers of the era. He always imagined things on a larger scope than most of us were able to conceptualize. He set the standard for complex randomized environments and laid some of the conceptual foundations for both the MMO and all modern games that incorporate random elements as part of their design.
Jim Marshall, a defensive end whose 19-year tenure with the Minnesota Vikings helped define the team’s hard-nosed identity, has died, the team announced Tuesday afternoon. He was 87.
“The entire Minnesota Vikings organization is mourning the loss of Jim Marshall. No player in Vikings history lived the ideals of toughness, camaraderie and passion more than the all-time iron man,” Minnesota’s owners said in a statement.
Marshall played 282 games (starting 277) during an unusually long career for any era; the former number is still a record for defensive players. He was weeks shy of his 42nd birthday when he played his final game in 1979.
Bud Grant: “Jim Marshall was special.”
One of the more intellectually respectable neocons, Michael Ledeen, has died without ever seeing the US invasion of Iran for which he advocated for decades:
Michael A. Ledeen, a major American historian and intellectual, died after suffering a series of small strokes on Sunday at his daughter’s house in Texas. He was 83 years old. Ledeen was a vigorous participant in contributing to the demise of the communist Soviet Union and its Iron Curtain allies in Eastern Europe.
Ledeen served as a special advisor on terrorism to President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, and later worked as a consultant for the National Security Council. Writing for the Asia Times, author and journalist David P. Goldman argued that Ledeen’s “personal contribution to America’s victory in the Cold War is far greater than the public record shows.”
Leeden did not advocate military intervention in Iran. He was in the business of replicating Reagan’s anti-Soviet playbook for Iran’s clerical regime.
Clown World just never stops lying. Ledeen had about as much to do with America’s victory in the Cold War as the average Zoomer born after the fall of the Soviet Union. And he was a rabid advocate of a US military empire in the Middle East; for all his subsequent denials, he stands condemned by his own words.
Scowcroft has managed to get one thing half right, even though he misdescribes it. He fears that if we attack Iraq “I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror.” One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That’s our mission in the war against terror. – Michael Ledeen, August 6, 2002, National Review
He also took credit for the color revolution in Ukraine that resulted in Russia’s Special Military Operation that has led to the loss of 66,000 square kilometers of territory and over one million Ukrainian lives.
Michael Ledeen offers his own praise for the Orange Revolution by, um…taking credit for it:
The mild support we gave to the democratic forces in the Ukraine proved far more powerful than most of the experts expected. The revolutionaries required a bit of guidance in the methods of non-violent resistance, a bit of communications gear, and many words of encouragement. They did the rest. The same can and should be done elsewhere in the world (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea…)
Not to mention EUR 130 billion in military aid…
Ledeen ended every column with “Faster, Please” in imitation of Cato’s demand for war with Carthage, so the subsequent attempts to retroactively whitewash his warmongering are obviously false. While it is best to avoid unnecessarily speaking ill of the dead, we cannot allow his fellow neoclowns to establish the false narrative that Ledeen was anything but an Israel First warmonger who sought to make use of US military power in defense of a foreign nation.
DISCUSS ON SG
Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Michelle Trachtenberg is dead at the age of 39. Causes not disclosed.
This one will hit GenX hard. Buffy wasn’t even that long ago, was it?