Tag: writing

Don’t Say Gay at Harvard

Harvard finally jettisons its plagiarist president:

After weeks of mounting evidence that Harvard President Claudine Gay essentially plagiarized her way to the top, Gay announced on Tuesday that she is resigning Tuesday afternoon, the Harvard Crimson reports.

Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into the presidency — comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.

Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.

It’s fascinating to observe how repeated incidents of plagiarism weren’t enough to unseat her, but as soon as it became clear that she was plagiarizing her antisemitism, it was evident that she had to go.

Elite academia is a particularly clownish joke, even for Clown World. It has been for decades, but now they’ve got retards who can’t even rite gud in the place of what had become the traditional foreign midwit.

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Mailvox: a brief review of ASOS

AD writes the first review of the complete A SEA OF SKULLS.

I’ve finished A Sea of Skulls. Bought it, set out to read a chapter a night…which became two, and then three, and by the time I reached about the 1/3 point, I put the whole world on hold and finished it in two days.

As usual, your writing skill and style are impeccable–entertaining and engaging. For every plot thread closed you’ve managed to dangle three more…though, I think the next book will have to crack the planet and drain an ocean to top this ending.

Thoroughly enjoyable. I appreciated how the races have their own issues that so perfectly mirror modern ones, and enjoyed working out the foreign words from context. And I remain impressed by your skills–you managed to take a thoroughly repulsive Orc, turn him into a viewpoint character, and make him understandable, if not necessarily empathetic. I was convinced he was going to join Skuli any minute when he was ordered to throw himself onto the shield wall.

And, speaking of Skuli, his last quest was excellent. Here’s to the next book–unless, of course, you retire to the tropics and dump the whole thing into the lap of Brandon Sanderson.

I think Brandon Sanderson is too busy counting his crowdfunding money these days to be available to finish off anyone else’s epic fantasy series. So, I’ll just have to finish it myself.

UPDATE: The Didact graciously named A SEA OF SKULLS one of his best books of 2023:

Has he stuck the landing with the full version of Book 2?

Mostly, yes, he has.

ASOS has a few flaws to it, most of which relate to the difficulties in keeping the various plot-lines straight. You may have to go back and read the first book again to understand all the machinations behind the Amorran side of things – it has, after all, been eleven years since the first book saw the light of day, and quite a lot has happened since then.

The biggest flaw with the book has to be the ending, which definitely feels rushed and more than a little forced. I get the distinct impression that OBADSDL(PBUH) found himself getting lost in the details and realised this giant door-stopper of a book was getting really crazy – the full book will probably clock in at around 914 (!!!!!) pages, and that is a monumental text by any measure.

None of this changes a fundamental fact:

This is one of the best high fantasy books ever written.

High praise indeed. And while I never object to any reader’s impressions – they are simply what they are – in the interests of accuracy I will point out that the endings were neither rushed nor forced from my perspective, as they were always bound to take the various shapes they did by virtue of the character perspective limits. Remember, I’m not George Martin, and while I don’t do outlines, I do strictly limit how many characters get their own perspective and how many sections they get apiece. So, I always know roughly how much space I have with which to work in order to get to the close I have in mind.

You may notice that the word and page counts are almost identical to ATOB. That’s not an accident. And AGOG will be the same.

This isn’t to say one can’t reasonably criticize the particular sections of the story on which I choose to concentrate the detail. Perhaps it would be better if the middles were shorter and the ends longer. My choices are almost certainly suboptimal in some senses, and some characters get less “camera time” while others get more than various readers would prefer.

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Orcs in the Korokhurmagh

This is a previously unreleased excerpt from the newly released full edition of A SEA OF SKULLS, which is now available in an ebook edition at the Arkhaven store.

Lugbol growled and slapped at one of the forest’s infernal insects that was busily engaged in biting his left bicep. He crushed it under his horny palm, felt a pop, and looked down to see he’d smeared his own dark green blood along with the remnants of the bug that had bitten him across his upper arm. He shook his head, knowing that the bite was going to start itching momentarily, then slapped fruitlessly at another one that had just bitten his calf.
“I don’t remember them being this bad before,” he complained.
“They had all the dead to feed on then,” Ghurash replied. Even though it had been less than three weeks since they’d fled the dark shadows of the Korokhurmagh, already the denizens of the forest had all but picked the thousands of dead bodies clean of flesh. They were rapidly approaching the western edge of the great wood and soon they would be encroaching on the true Man lands, not merely the pillaging the small villages and hamlets that had been carved out of the trees by the lesser tribes and clans.
The Hagahorn’ugh had been cocky and full of contempt for the martial abilities of the Szavon’agh as they passed through the burned-out remains of the villages overrun by Zlatagh’s army, but they gradually fell silent and their mood turned grim as they began to come across one large-skulled, thick-boned skeleton after another. There were few Man skeletons, and the bones of those they encountered were eagerly snatched up and divided among sqwaaks and younger kors seeking clubs or remains to decorate their armor.
More than a dozen fights broke out over the Man bones, the worst of which began when a boar rider commandeered a large thigh bone another kor had intended for a club, then cracked it open and sucked out the marrow. By the time Lugbol and Karnuhg, one of the cavalry grun-kors, managed to put a stop to the fracas, four mountain orcs and two Black Fists were dead, and another Hagahornu was so badly wounded that he ended up in the cookpot that evening.
The kral chewed him out for the needless death of his orcs, of course, but Lugbol had the sneaking suspicion that the older orc was secretly impressed at how Lugbol’s veteran kors managed to more than hold their own against the bigger mountain orcs. In fact, knowing that Lugbol, being Goghu and half the size of his Hagahornu officers, could never pose a threat to his rule, Nekheru had proven increasingly inclined to give his new hadvezer more responsibilities as they marched through the forest toward the Man lands. In addition to commanding the light infantry and the goblin cavalry, Lugbol was now serving as the liason between the farkh’agh and the various shugaba’ugh and grun-kors whose kors had the annoying habit of feasting upon their fellow marching companions whenever they couldn’t find adequate meat to sate their appetites.
Two large goblins, wearing the ornate headgear favored by their shugaba’agh, approached him now, escorted by a nervous-looking bodyguard of twelve lightly-armored yellowskins carrying pikes. Lugbol groaned. Given the angry expressions on their hook-chinned, hook-nosed faces, he had a pretty good idea of why they were coming to see him, even though they were attached to units outside his command.

Continue reading “Orcs in the Korokhurmagh”

A SEA OF SKULLS Full Edition

Castalia House is pleased to announce that the full text of A SEA OF SKULLS is now complete at an estimated 914 pages and is available in a new ebook edition at the Arkhaven store for $7.99. This is the initial text edition and therefore lacks an appendix and the additional images that will be added to the print edition, which is expected to be released in the spring and should clock in around 924 pages.

A coupon for a free download will be sent out to the readers who purchased the abbreviated edition back in 2016 and sent in their proofs of purchase from Amazon. The first batch have gone out already, the remainder will go out before midnight. If you don’t get one, or if you didn’t send in your Kindle proof of purchase for it already, please don’t do so now. I’m sure it will be on the various pirate sites before the weekend is out. The coupon for a free download will also be provided to all Castalia Library, Libraria Castalia, and Castalia History subscribers in the December monthly newsletter, which will go out next week.

Merry Christmas, Librarians…

The two leather volumes will be included in the Castalia Library and Libraria Castalia subscriptions sometime next year. An audiobook+ edition will be released once Jeremy Daw has finished recording it. I do not intend to make either the ebook or the audiobook available through Amazon, at least not at this time.

I hope you will enjoy the latest edition to the epic fantasy saga. If you discover any typos or errata, please do not send emails to me as you encounter them, but compile a list and send it to me after you have finished the book. As we did with A THRONE OF BONES, we will do iterative corrections and update the ebook accordingly.

In Selenoth, the war drums are beating throughout the land. The savage orcs of Hagahorn and Zoth Ommog are on the move, imperiling Man, Dwarf, and Elf alike. The Houses Martial of Amorr have gone to war with each other, pitting legion against legion, and family against family, as civil war wracks the disintegrating Empire. In the north, inhuman wolf-demons besiege the last redoubt of Man in the White Sea, while in Savondir, the royal house of de Mirid desperately prepares to defend the kingdom against an invading army that is larger than any it has ever faced before. And in the underground realm of the King of Iron Mountain, a strange new enemy has been attacking dwarf villages throughout the Underdeep.

Beneath the widespread violence that has seized all Selenoth in its grasp, a select few are beginning to recognize the appearance of a historic pattern of almost unimaginable proportions. Are all these conflicts involving Orc, Elf, Man, and Dwarf the natural result of inevitable rivalries, or are they little more than battlegrounds in an ancient war that began long before the dawn of time?

DISCUSS ON SG

Don’t See That Often

In which a term I coined – in this case, “midwit” – is correctly attributed to me.

IQ Bell Curve, also known as IQ Distribution Curve and Midwit, refers to a series of memes that use the IQ distribution diagrams to mock one of the three main groups represented by the diagram, most often targeting the largest group of people representing the average intelligence. The concept of IQ Bell Curve memes utilizes the horseshoe theory, implying that the groups with low intelligence and high intelligence often chose to follow the same goals while being guided by different reasoning. Those who possess average intelligence are referred to as “midwits.”

Origin
The word “mid-witted” was popularized by far-right activist and writer Vox Day. On February 17th, 2012, Vox Day[1] published the blog post “The tragedy of the mid-witted” in which he commented on a life story article “Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume” by Jennifer Wright.[2] In the blog post, Vox Day writes that “those who possess above-average intelligence and trouble to occasionally read newspapers and magazines tend to genuinely be under the erroneous impression that they possess superlative intelligence.”

It will be interesting to see how long that particular attribution lasts. I tend to doubt they’ll do the same with Gamma Male or Sigma Male, at least not until the SSH book is published and the terms are sufficiently clarified again.

I do find it a little confusing that people continue to refer to me as some sort of activist, given the fact that I’m almost the exact opposite of one. An activist generally doesn’t write novels or completely shun both the media and the government-corporate complex, as he is usually far too busy running around demonstrating, seeking attention, and attempting to strike up relationships with celebrities and other influential individuals.

The problem, I suspect, is that in the aftermath of the death of the late, great Umberto Eco, the term “public intellectual” has been essentially abandoned due to the way in which most figures in the public eye these days are both anti-intellectual and mid-witted.

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Bran Stark is Sauron

This is a theory put forth by an SG reader. I made a few minor edits for clarity.

TLDR: We know that Bran is Sauron from the nature of A Song of Ice and Fire. ASOIAF is the Satanically-inverted Lord of the Rings, so the winner, by definition, has to be Sauron. QED.

Leaving that aside, let’s look at Bran as Sauron using LOTR, the Silmarillion, the Appendices, the Bible, and vampire lore. When we look at Bran as Third-Age Sauron we have to see him as inverted from the Dark Lord all-seeing eye in the movies. We also have to see Bran as Second-Age Sauron, aka Annataur.

Second Age Sauron is a very seductive figure who Tolkien writes as the Antichrist from the Book of Revelation. Also keep in mind that vampires are a representation of the Antichrist . Now that we’ve laid that ground work, let’s look at how we know that Rape Rape made Bran and the Three-Eyed Raven (3ER) into a combination of Sauron and The One Ring.

The Wall and the Land Beyond is the inverted Mordor. Mordor is fire and ash. The land beyond The Wall is a world of ice. The White Walkers are the Black Riders. The Wall is the Mountains of Shadow and the Ash Mountains which were either raised by Sauron himself or by Morgoth as a fortress against the world. The Wall was raised to protect the world from the Three-Eyed Raven. 3ER’s cave is Barad Dur. We see Sauron watching the whole world from Barad Dur and 3ER watches the whole world from his cave and sends out emissaries from his cave.

Bran/Sauron as vampire: In ASOIAF, in the Cave Bran eats acorn paste which is highly likely the ground up remains of his friend Jojen Reed. This was done to turbo-charge his powers. This is vampiricism of Bran consuming his friend to gain more power. This is likely also some kind of satanic Eucharist, to use the Catholic term which is appropriate here.

Sauron was portrayed as a vampire in The Silmarillion. When he was defeated by Luthien, Sauron turned into a bat and flew away. Bran also sacrificed others so he could live. We saw Bran sacrifice Hodor and Bran sacrifice a whole freaking army at the Battle of the Long Night. These are the actions of Sauron, who loves to sacrifice other to advance his agenda

Sauron uses the Palantir to spy on the whole world. Likewise Bran uses the weirwood trees and ravens to spy on the whole world, and likely cause chaos as well.

More of Bran as a vampire. Bran with 3ER had to be invited into the world of the living when they were permitted to enter Castle Black from the land beyond just like how vampires have to be invited in. This has correlation to Sauron in the Second Age where first he disguised himself as Annataur, the Lord of Gifts to Celebrimbor in Eregion. He presented himself as wise and beautiful. Annataur just wanted to “heal the world” aka “Tikkun Olam” from the damage of the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age. He always provided the Noldor with hidden knowledge.

Sauron/Annataur used this hidden knowledge that he provided to pit Celebrimbor against Galadriel and divided the Elves to prevent them from uniting before he destroyed Eregion. Sauron used the same trick against the usurper king of Numenor at the end of the Second Age. He allowed himself to be taken prisoner to Numenor where he corrupted the king and people.

Bran is the inversion of Annataur. Annataur cloaked himself in beauty, wisdom and hidden knowledge. Bran cloaked himself in weakness, autism, false humility and hidden knowledge. Bran uses his hidden knowledge to pit people against each other. The best example is how he used his hidden knowledge of Jon’s true identity to pit him against Dany. This was a major cause of driving Dany mad and making her burn King’s Landing, delegitimizing Jon as a contender to the throne and paving the way for Bran’s ascension to total power

In conclusion, Bran’s actions are Sauron’s action. Bran acts as vampire, Lord of Gifts and pathetically inverted Dark Lord in Martin’s satanically-inverted manner. But it’s all good because Rape Rape approves of Bran’s tax policy.

DISCUSS ON SG

Copyright is Corporate Welfare

You won’t often hear a publisher or an author speak out against the manufactured government-monopoly granted legal right that is “copyright”. And I’m not doing so because there are some books by deceased authors that we would definitely publish if their copyright was expired, or because I believe that the extended copyright of life+70 years is both immoral and absurd even though I do. In most cases, we have absolutely no problem obtaining the necessary rights from the copyright holders.

What I’m addressing here instead is the reality of the situation that surrounds the issue, because nearly everyone who opines about it is doing so in complete ignorance and on the basis of some wildly false assumptions.

First and foremost, the idea that no one will write books if they are not “protected” by copyright that “gives them the opportunity” to sell and profit from them is absolutely and utterly false. It is such a ridiculously stupid statement that anyone who argues this should never, ever, express their opinion on anything ever again, because they are not only literally retarded, they are also historical null sets. I will never regard anyone who presents this argument as a cognitive adult, because it requires a complete absence of both thought and relevant information.

Copyright was invented in The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”. Previous “copyrights” were simple royal monopolies granted on an individual basis, which should make plain the true foundation of the so-called “moral right”. Regardless, the fact is that all of the pre-1710 classics were written sans copyright, thereby exploding the ahistorical notion of copyright causality.

But one doesn’t need to know anything about history to realize that economic factors do not drive the impulse for human creativity. Consider the current numbers reported by the book publishing industry.

  • 787,700,000: Total US print editions sold in 2022
  • 526,000,000: Total US ebook editions sold in 2022
  • $22,600,000,000: Total US print revenue in 2022
  • $2,040,000,000: Total US ebook revenue in 2022
  • $8,900,000,000: Big 4 publisher revenue in 2022 (Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmillan)
  • 4,000,000: The number of new books published in 2022.
  • 2,300,000: The number of self-published books published in 2022
  • 600,000: The number of self-published books published in 2014
  • 80: The percent of total book distribution controlled by Amazon.
  • The average book sells 200 copies in its first year and 1,000 over its lifetime on Amazon

In other words, each print edition produced an average $28.69 in revenue while each ebook produced an average $3.88 in revenue. So the average book produces $27,182.80 lifetime revenue, with at most $17,668.82 going to the average self-published author and $997.30 to the average mainstream published author. Obviously, since Colleen Hoover sold more than 4,730,000 books in 2022, the median book lifetime revenue is considerably lower, but the averages are sufficiently informative to make it clear that absolutely no one is writing books in order to make less than $20,000 over the entire sales lifetime of the book.

Still less is copyright required to defend the interests of any heirs to that massive average windfall.

The fact is that copyright is nothing more than corporate welfare that primarily benefits five companies in the publishing industry and is defended by a very small number of corporate-favored authors who are the chosen beneficiaries of those five companies. Copyright is neither a moral right nor a property right, it is actually a violation of the economic rights of hundreds of millions of people for the benefit of a very, very small number of individuals connected to an insignificant number of corporations.

As for me, I would write even if absolutely no one ever read my books. I have written and published 27,435 blog posts and more than 500 opinion columns without ever getting paid for a single one of them. And not only am I very, very far from alone in that regard, I can count on one hand the number of writers I know who will not write if they don’t get paid for it.

DISCUSS ON SG

Why I Dislike Quote Posts

I do not quote post. I find quote-posting to be rather narcissistic, mostly unnecessary, and somewhat smacking of the Smart Boy. I don’t think it should be banned or restricted, but I have to admit that I do tend to roll my eyes at a post that quotes a post that already has healthy engagement with dozens of comments.

There is, of course, a place for quote-posting. Ironically, the people who absolutely should be quote-posting don’t, while most of the people who do really shouldn’t. The ideal place for quote-posting is when your comment is excessively tangential to the original post or would otherwise tend to derail the discussion of the topic at hand. For example, if you’re going to take pedantic and detailed exception to some minor aspect of the post in question, or if you’re a Protestant/Catholic who is going to take the opportunity to unnecessarily express your very important opinion of the Roman Catholic Church/Random Protestant Denomination, that would be a good time to quote the post and thereby branch the discussion in an appropriate manner that most of the commenters on the thread will tend to appreciate.

If, however, you’re merely quote-posting to ensure that your Very Important Comment is not lost amidst the general stream of commentary on the topic, well, that’s simply not necessary. I’m not going to say that such a quote-poster is necessarily seeking attention with all the intensity of a girl on a pole chasing dollar bills, but that’s pretty much how it tends to strike me, anyhow.

Here’s how you can tell the difference: how much engagement of your quote post can you reasonably expect in comparison with the original post? If there is a reasonable fraction, then you’ve probably reasonably branched the discussion and provided a useful service to the community. If, however, there is no engagement, then you’re just quoting-posting to no purpose and everyone would be better off if you would simply comment on the original post instead of quoting it. Once you start to recognize the pattern of when others engage and when they don’t, it should be possible for you to improve your decision-making in this regard.

And for the love of all that is good and holy and beautiful and true, please recognize that a quote of this post, or any post on the subject, will neither be clever nor witty nor anything but painfully obvious.

DISCUSS ON SG

Word Counts

It’s not a competition; some of the best books ever written are not particularly long. The one that surprised me most is WATERSHIP DOWN, as that has always struck me as a massive and epic tale. But it does put things in perspective, sizewise.

The Hobbit – 95,022
The Fellowship of the Ring – 187,790
The Two Towers – 156,198
The Return of the King – 137,115
THE LORD OF THE RINGS – 573,125 total

Summa Elvetica & Other Stories – 173,493
A Throne of Bones – 297,500
A Sea of Skulls – 299,320
ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT – 717,313 and counting

Philosopher’s Stone – 77,325
Chamber of Secrets – 84,799
Prisoner of Azkaban – 106,821
Goblet of Fire – 190,858
Order of the Phoenix – 257,154
Half Blood Prince – 169,441
Deathly Hallows – 198,227
HARRY POTTER SERIES – 1,084,675 total

A Game of Thrones – 296,901
A Clash of Kings – 321,676
A Storm of Swords – 414,792
A Feast for Crows – 296,989
A Dance with Dragons – 413,202
A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE – 1,746,560 total (assuming the reports that he’s laid down the pen are true)

Gardens of the Moon – 242,265
Deadhouse Gates – 316,975
Memories of Ice – 408,425
House of Chains – 326,275
Midnight Tides – 288,920
The Bonehunters – 390,755
Reaper’s Gale – 382,000
Toll the Hounds – 409,355
Dust of Dreams – 402,070
The Crippled God – 421,755
MALAZAN BOOK OF THE FALLEN – 3,255,546 total

Dune – 187,240
Dune Messiah – 75,127
Children of Dune – 148,381
God Emperor of Dune – 138,167
Heretics of Dune – 165,131
Chapterhouse Dune – 143,435
DUNE SAGA – 857,481 total

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Continue reading “Word Counts”