Tag: UATV

He’s Not Entirely Wrong

Richard Spencer celebrates the subversion of Christmas music:

I, for one, really appreciate the Jewish contribution to Christmas music. This time of year wouldn’t be the same without “Rudolph,” “White Christmas,” “Chestnuts,” and more. As opposed to attacking this supposed “subversion” of Christmas, traditionalists should ask themselves why they are so unmusical, charmless, and boring and couldn’t compose any timeless songs.

Of course Spencer doesn’t care about the subversion; he’s not a Christian. And the 20th Century songs are quite good, for the most part, being catchy and well-compose. But that doesn’t make them any less subversive; their intent is to shift the focus of Christmas from the Christian celebration of the birth of Man’s Savior to rather less edifying topics, including snow, hoofed mammals with nasal abnormalities, and the urban shopping experience.

Silver Bells is absolutely and undeniably a charming song. That’s why it is successfully subversive.

Where Spencer has a point is when he observes that we Christians would do well to follow the lead of our gifted forebears and compose our own songs. We can’t possibly know if they are timeless or not, because only the test of time will tell. And, let’s face it, neither we nor the subversives will ever write anything as good as Adeste Fideles. But that shouldn’t stop us from doing our best to serve our King.

So, this would seem to be as good time as ever to share this new mix of This Very Night, complete with guitar and choir. If you’re a UATV subscriber, you can download the MP3 by clicking on the blue button.

Stars above shine ever bright
Angels sing with pure delight
Of Mary born this sacred night
Comes our savior, Jesus Christ

Shepherds hear the holy call
Heaven’s gift for one and all
In the darkness shines a light
A savior born this very night

Heartfelt prayers on Christmas eve
In His grace we now perceive
And by faith do we believe
The King of Kings shall we receive

Hallelujah raise your voice
In His birth now we rejoice
Come to Jesus, hear the call
He has come to save us all

Children gather ’round the tree
Hearts aglow with reverie
Love and hope and faith and glee
By this birth are we set free

Hallelujah raise your voice
In His birth now we rejoice
This is Christmas, heed the call
Jesus came to save us all

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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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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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WARNING: Server Work

We’re dealing with some infrastructure issues at UATV and Arktoons, so don’t be surprised if either site is a little slow or goes temporarily dark this week.

On the plus side, we have a dev who has volunteered to pick up the slack at Arktoons, so if that works out, there will be no reason to make any changes and we may even get the key piece of the puzzle finished that is required to make it viable for creators.

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