Tag: Unauthorized

The sold-out show in Portland went extremely well. I talked to both the Big Bear as well as the director of the documentary and they said the energy of the crowd was off the charts; the director said it felt more like a rock concert than a comedy show.

A quote from one attendee: “I NEVER get star struck, but…holy hell he’s good!”

From another: “Thank you, Owen! What a great show last night. The excitement in the air was electric. It was awesome to see such a large turn-out in support of having a good time. Nobody is having more fun than us.”

Next stop: Idaho!

The Big Bear’s sold-out Fall 2019 tour begins tonight in Portland, so today is the last day you can support it from afar by purchasing the 2019 tour t-shirt. However, you will be able to purchase the signed, limited edition collector’s DVD until the last of the 250 have been sold. The digital special and the digital documentary will be available indefinitely.

UPDATE: Now that the tour has begun, we are no longer selling the tour support t-shirts. Thanks very much to everyone who bought one and helped make the Fall 2019 tour possible! If you were at the show in Portland tonight, feel free to leave your comments about it here. However, please do NOT repeat any of the jokes that were told!

The Hollywood Reporter divides comedy into SJW Empire and Alt-Right Rebels:

When Saturday Night Live fired Shane Gillis on Sept. 16 — just four days after he was cast as one of the latest Not Ready for Prime Time Players — the news was greeted with high-fives in much of the comedy community. Dana Gould tweeted that Gillis should strive to “be a better comic,” while Silicon Valley actor Jimmy O. Yang posted that Gillis deserved to go because he was “just plain racist.”

But not all comedians were rejoicing. On the contrary, the Gillis controversy — which began hours after his hiring, when podcasts surfaced of the 30-year-old Philadelphia comic calling presidential candidate Andrew Yang a “Jew chink” and spewing other racist and homophobic jokes — has become a flashpoint revealing a deep and widening rift in the comedy world. Like every other aspect of American life in the Trump era, stand-up is turning polarized, pitting comic against comic in an escalating civil war over what’s acceptable humor and what’s unfunny hate speech. “You millennials, you’re a bunch of rats, all of you,” Gillis defender Bill Burr snarled on David Spade’s Comedy Central show. “None of them cares. All they want to do is get people in trouble.”

If the pro-Gillis faction has a rebel base, it would be Gas Digital, a subscription streaming network (it charges $8.50 a month) based in New York’s East Village and catering to alt-right sensibilities — or what others see as envelope-pushing, “anything goes” comedy in the vein of Lenny Bruce or Sam Kinison. Gillis was a regular on its airwaves (it’s where he cracked his Andrew Yang jokes, as well as another in which he referred to Judd Apatow and actor Chris Gethard as “white faggot comics”).

Says Gas Digital co-founder Luis J. Gomez, “It’s funny, because when you said one side is very tolerant and inclusive, I was like, ‘Yes, that’s the side I’m on.’ ” Gomez, who co-hosts the service’s popular Legion of Skanks podcast (it tallies half a million downloads per episode), insists any characterization of his network as “alt-right” is wildly off base. “We are on the side of funny,” he says. “We’re just trying to create freely. I think when you get off Twitter and Reddit and YouTube, you find people who aren’t super sensitive about jokes.”

It’s amusing that they STILL don’t dare to mention the Big Bear’s name. It’s not authorized, you see. But any journalist who wants to schedule an interview with him or any other Unauthorized persona is more than welcome to contact our Public Relations Specialist, Pax Dickenson.

His supporters satirize his opponents’ anxiety about the extent of his power by calling President Trump “God-Emperor,” but the taunt is only effective because Americans are not supposed to want kings, never mind emperors. And yet, how else would one define the West? Can there be civilization without hierarchy? Can there be peace without an emperor? Throughout the Middle Ages, European Christians looked to Charlemagne as the model for the emperor who would defend Christendom and bring back the glories of Rome. How much did Charlemagne himself contribute to this ideal? Would the Franks of the eighth and ninth centuries have recognized later representations of Charles as emperor and king?

Medieval History 101 Episode X: Getting Medieval on the Emperor by the Grace of God. Episode Guide.

Maybe, just maybe, we knew what we were doing by setting up Unauthorized the way we did:

At the same time the government launched their probe, the top publishers in the country had gathered for an emergency summit in New York. Advertising dollars from 2015-2018 were slowly declining. 2019 trends were showing an alarming trend with programmatic revenues in freefall industry-wide. Ad revenue across publishing was down over 50{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf}??? There’s gotta be an explanation for this?

Here’s the sticky-fingered culprit. Facebook has decided to sweep the leg on the entire industry, it’s actually happening now. But why now? The reason why is shockingly simple.

Google and Facebook are ad-supported businesses. They want to get you on their pages and keep you there at all costs. This puts them at odds with the publishing community, much of which is ad supported. Google. Facebook, and Amazon control 70{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf} of all online ad dollars spent. The rest of the publishing world fights for scraps of the other 30{56510949195f95f693d0700c7df4a440f85fa77fe69050b28a344594aa03acbf}. But Google and Facebook got together last year and colluded with each other, asking a simple, shocking question, a question that prompted the anti-trust probe:

“What if we took it all?”

And these clowns actually agreed they should fuckin’ do it. Holy smokes.

The endgame is underway. Last Thursday, Rooster Teeth, a company I admire and have tremendous respect for laid off 50 people. To avoid the same fate publishers have absolutely littered their website with ads; Pop-ups, Auto-sound ads, the kitchen sink, to stay afloat. We haven’t followed suit. Frankly I’d rather die.

Fewer publishers, and the ones left must worship a new god. Sound familiar?

By taking it all, the Duopoly actually wins twice. Not only do they kill publishers and take their money, what’s left of the publishers who hang on will have no choice but to attach their skeleton crew to Facebook and Google for life support. Facebook will actually have the balls to play savior by creating, say, a ‘preferred publisher program’, anointing a handful of publishers as partners who will get traffic from FB and just enough ad revenue to survive. Then Facebook’s algorithm will only show you articles from those publishers that their algorithm thinks you want to see. Your entire internet consumption, as well as how you think and feel, will be dictated to you.

theCHIVE doesn’t have that option nor would we want it. Logically, if the ad-supported model is dying, we must diversify our business model. We must control our own destiny and diversify away from ad-supported to subscription model.

If you’ve noticed, we don’t advertise any of our projects anywhere. Arkhaven, Castalia, Infogalactic, VFM and Unauthorized all refuse to pay-to-play on Amazon, Facebook, Google, or anywhere else. We would rather rely upon our core supporters, focus upon serving them, and gradually grow that strong foundation than try to catch a big wave on Amazon or wherever.

Why? Because the wave belongs to the wave maker and is entirely under its control! We’ve seen, repeatedly, that even million-selling Amazon authors have ZERO support outside of Amazon. Their success is entirely in the hands of potentially hostile parties, which is why we’d rather have a small, but very reliable set of supporters than a large, but entirely unreliable one.

Build your own platform. Build your own market. TheCHIVE has belatedly realized what we knew all along: if people aren’t willing to pay for it directly, it isn’t worth doing in the first place. And if you haven’t subscribed to Unauthorized yet, you can do so here. And speaking of UATV, there is a new Chuck Dixon video on the upcoming Birds of Prey movie up now.  Yes, believe it or not, he wrote that comic too….

Episode IX: Getting Medieval on the Battle of Tours. For Unauthorized subscribers only.

Eighteen years ago, at the beginning of the third millennium after the birth of Christ, Muslim jihadists flew planes into the Twin Towers in New York City. Was this a watershed in the clash of civilizations? You would think after eighteen years, we would know, but historians have been arguing for centuries about the meaning of the Frankish encounter with Muslim forces at the Battle of Tours-Poitiers. Spoiler alert: The Franks won! But how was the battle remembered? Do we have Charlemagne to thank for defeating the Saracens? You know very well the story is more complicated than you have heard!

Episode Guide.

Prof. Rachel Fulton Brown returns with a look at Charlemagne’s elephant.

Where did Charlemagne get his elephant and what does it tell us about the relationship between the Franks and the Mediterranean world that once was Rome? The answer may surprise you—it certainly surprised the Danes!

Medieval History 101 Episode VIII guide.

If you’re interested in supporting the Big Bear’s YOU’RE DOING GREAT KID 2019 fall tour but you can’t attend any of the four shows, three of which are already sold out, you can now do so at the tour video page at Arkhaven.

There are three video products available, two of which will be provided for free to Unauthorized subscribers. But you may want to order one anyhow if you want to support the tour. There will also be an official tour t-shirt, which will include the tour special, available soon as well:

– Tour special $10
– Tour documentary $25
– Signed Limited Edition DVD (250) $100

YouTube deplatforms The Iconoclast:

As the wave of social media censorship continues, another big name–or scalp–has been claimed by Big Tech. It was announced on Facebook that prominent British YouTuber, The Iconoclast, who amassed a large following of over 200,000 on the platform, recently had his entire channel deleted. The Iconoclast produced dozens of high quality videos covering sociopolitical currents in Europe, with some attracting hundreds of thousands of views.

The Iconoclast was one of many creators on the so-called ‘Dissident’ Right to have been demonetized amid a wave of censorship after updating their Terms of Service, in June this year.

It’s interesting to see that the Big Tech companies appear to feel considerably more confident deplatforming people in the USA and in the UK. I suspect this has something to do with the differences in the various legal codes. Regardless, if you are not willing to take them on in court or arbitration, as per the terms of use specified, you should assume that you will eventually be taken down.

And, as always, build your own platforms. On that note, UATV continues to grow explosively, both in terms of subscribers and viewers. In fact, it’s up 152 percent this month in terms of the latter. And we expect to debut SocialGalactic 2.0 in October.