I’m tired.
I mean, okay, part of the reason I’m tired is that my thyroid is still not quite right, and I’m trying to get the full house unpacked by the end of the month. And I’m trying to edit the YUGE book, and… and never sufficiently d*mned daylight savings time has thrown a spanner in my physical works just at this time.
But the other part of why I’m tired is more of a Weltschmerz, a weariness of the soul.
It got triggered yesterday by some poor sod on Twittex. I’m told he is an artist himself, and that I shouldn’t be mad at him. I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at the same old, same old he disseminated.
If he’s an artist, he’s been beaten down so far he now thinks it’s the law of the world for the left to clobber the right in artistic fields.
Look, I’m sick and tired of the story that goes something like this: The right is more hidebound/rationalist/uninterested in art. This is why the left took over and conquered all the non-STEM fields, and why they now control the culture. If the right wants to fight back, it needs to fight for the culture.
Everything in that paragraph is a life lie, except the last paragraph. And the last paragraph isn’t a lie, it’s just outdated. The right has fought back and is starting to make the left bleed freely.
I first had this argument with another of my kind — creative, on the right — in … 2009? I think. The other creative was Roger L. Simon, and he was peddling this same story. I think he believed it, in his case, because he’d not broken in as a right winger, but changed after. But still, it was inexcusable for the writer of “Blacklisting Myself” not to realize the right hadn’t walked away from culture-molding pursuits: from literature to art, from theater to news, from Hollywood to music the left was keeping out and giving hind teat not only to anyone to the right of Lenin, but to anyone they suspected MIGHT be to the right of Lenin. Or even to anyone who showed even an inkling of a glimmer of independent thought.
Which is why they are losing the culture war, the only way it can be lost once you have control of the means of distribution — well, not the only way. New technology to distribute the art and news and all the mass communication also helped — i.e. they have become an echo chamber, predictable, detached from reality — the best art touches, and amplifies reality, even in fantasy — and so inbred and involuted that it appeals to no one.
Look, I remember, if you can’t, that in 2012 the right was way behind the left on memes, and now everyone knows the left can’t meme.
The truth is that the right is more creative. Not, mind you, that we are special in our own, but because coming to the right while the left controlled the culture required a certain independence of mind to begin with. And of course, we’re not controlled top-down which allows us to be more creative still.
What we lack is money. Right now all the people who pay big money for artists and creatives, and productions, and movies, and all that are on the left. And I suspect once we track where all the government money is going, we’ll find that the crappy art, the strange plays about trans nonsense that supreme court judges (Kentaji Brown. no, really) can star in, etc. are all being paid for by our money.
On the other hand, being paid for by big NGOs and the government will impair your creativity.
So, we need to figure out a way to have the people finance it. We need to figure out a way to have people find out what we’re creating and pay for what they like. And we’re finding it, from indie to kickstarter.
It’s early days enough, but even our small endeavors are enough to to put the hurt on the arts-industrial-complex.
And I’m doing my part to promote and spread the word about indie writers. (To be fair all writers I like, not just indies, but a lot end up being indies.)
You do your part. And stop beating us down.
There is no psychological “explanation” for how the left came to dominate culture. it was all brutal game theory of hiring and promoting ONLY people who absolutely agreed with them, while the right hired and promoted anyone who was competent.
FYI by the time the lefty house of cards started to collapse they were starting to do the same to STEM. And it shows.
So stop beating us. We’re already winning the race, even though we’re running with a foot in a cement sack.
Perhaps give a little push when you can, instead?
According To Hoyt 
everything in that paragraph is a life …. Sometimes your typos, unlike mine, are divinely inspired.
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Lie. Dear Lord. It was late.
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I know what you meant, and I the king of careless typing am the last to criticize. What struck me, though, is that both readings are true.
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yes.
And then this morning on twitter someone chose to give me tomorrow’s post. And I woke up and committed violence.
It was all about “The arts don’t matter. Chinese eighth graders do calculus” Some wise rabbi said “Not of bread alone lives man.” BUT THEY’RE STILL TRYING TO MAKE US ALL BAKERS.
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Given the actual crashing birth rate and population numbers hiding below the officially admitted-to birth rate and population numbers, those calculus-fluent Chinese eighth graders will be fewer and fewer…
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And those who actually learn will have nowhere to use it, and certainly not inovatively.
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exactly this. One thing that’s not often noted is that people too focused on math often don’t do very well, relatively, on Wall Street while people with degrees in philosophy often do. My economics stuff is a useful credential annd the math I studied seldom used, but the philosophy annd above all history have been critical.
All the sages, from Confucius to Aquinas by way of Aristotle, agree that balance is what’s important.
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Both my husband and my younger son seem to have the “investing groove” which, sadly my husband only found in his late fifties. This is inherited in Dan’s line.
Note though that even though they’re both math geeks, that’s NOT how they talk about stocks. That’s all “I have a feeling” Or “I just know” which is how I talk about plot, not how they talk about math. The fact that their “feelings” are right about 75% of the time is weird, but how the computer between their ears spits out the odds is…. unfathomable.
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My beloved came to it late as well. He did up a couple of spreadhseets he uses to compare fundamentals, but it’s still largely intuition.
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That sounds like cooking– like how folks will look at a recipe they’ve never seen, and can tell you roughly what it will taste like, or where there’s likely a problem.
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Oh, I can do that. Dan and the kid not at all.
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Oddly, perhaps, I’m not terrible intuitive about investments. I have a discipline that i stick to and have tried to eliminate as much intuition and emotion as I can. Whenever I back emotion, I lose.
where intuition came into it was way back in the beginning when I realized I was asking the wrong questions. A hint, the object of the exercise is not to lose money and leading indicators ought to lead rather than be coincidental or lag. Never make a bet where you can lose more than you can afford and it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
on the other hand, I never made a big fortune since making a big fortune requires making large, concentrated, overlooked bets. My discipline is the antithesis of that, though I probably take more “risk” than the orthodox models recommend.
You know who does bet on intuition and gut? George Soros. All that stuff he writes about is ex-post justification. However found a human he is, and foul he is, he is an investor of genius and the human mind is a wonderful thing in that it can process without us realizing and manifest in its own way.
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Yes, remember in the stock market the most important thing is not return on your investment but return OF your investment.
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“…making a big fortune requires making large, concentrated, overlooked bets.”
For most people who don’t do well on such bets, that echoes strongly another field: The way to make a small fortune in auto racing is to start with a large one.
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“How to make a million in the horse industry?”
“Start with 2 million, or more.”
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From my brief time in the financial industry, I learned that it is about 1% math (that being mostly addition and subtraction, with the occasional multiplication or division) – and 99% people.
That is why my time was brief…
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And all will be Han. I really think the Chinese government finally found a way to get rid of their “inferior” races.
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I saw your response to the guy on Twitter and it made excellent sense. Hopefully it’ll soak through a few skulls.
I’m feeling worn, too. Part of it in my case was being earnestly told by vendors at a fiber show last week that I should buy silk fiber now, since it was going to become super expensive because of tariffs. (The fiber in question comes from New Zealand, so why would China tariff them? But didn’t think of that at the time). And people being afraid to say anything even slightly disapproving of gender madness and I blew it, too. And I am so flaming tired of reading author bios that include pronouns and alleged sexual orientation in an article about spinning. Who the $%#@!! cares, if they’re competent?
And part of it is pollen season has started and I can count on being run down for a while now.
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I saw that yesterday, and I think there’s an important secondary point that the poster was oblivious to.
The comment was trying to claim that the Chinese are superior because their 8th grade kids are learning Calculus instead of art. But even if you take the Chinese claims at face value, it ignores the fact that humans need both. We need calculus to build things, or get things to work. But we also need art because art gives us things to enjoy when we aren’t using calculus. No healthy society can only exist on one or the other. A healthy society needs both.
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Precisely.
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I didn’t see that one, but I wonder if the point he was trying to make was a simple, “They’re teaching their kids useful things and we’re teaching idiocy.”
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Not from how he said it. See capture in today’s post. it was all STOMP STOMP be scared Chinese 8th graders are learning Calculus. And his objection was SPECIFICALLY to ADULTS arguing about art.
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Learning only Calculus is how you get scientists who view ethics as a hindrance.
https://twitchy.com/grateful-calvin/2025/03/11/rice-university-scientist-ethics-is-holding-back-innovation-and-progress-n2409650
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Calculus helps you figure out how to build something. Art helps you figure out what to build.
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And engineering helps you figure out how it has to be built. Common sense asks why would you want to build it and where is it going to leak.
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No, just trig.
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For some fields (fluidics, for instance) calculus and differential equations help.😉
Although I can probably count on the fingerss of one hand the number of times I used more than trig and (occasionally) thermodynamics and statistics over a 30-year career.
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The CCP Chinese want to send all those university-trained math majors out to the collective farms, or maybe to the collective general store and the collective cafeteria, way out in the country where people don’t even speak the same kind of Chinese, to work at menial labor.
Because it worked so well in the Cultural Revolution.
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c4c
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Remember, the Left and the Devil -lie-.
Lies.
Lies.
Lies.
And -bullshit-.
They -say- they are winning. Its a lie. They plant stories that demand despair. Its a lie. The Enemy is winning on all fronts. -Bullshit- as the Glorious Victories !!! keep getting closer and closer to the Bunker.
Dooooooooooommmmmm!!!!
…
Nope. We win. They lose. Often, just by us showing up and pointing out “bullshit”. Much to their dismay. The Sleepers have Awakened.
Gamergate. What an epic own-goal by the poopheads. Go bullshit the folks who put winning way above just about anything else. Instead of Gamergate, call it the Great Leftroid Rake Stomping. Template for what was to come.
See also 2016 and 2024. We got a bit too comfy with inevitable Trump in 2020, and they were a leeetle too obviously desperate. And note that afterwards they had the opportunity to really wreck things for us, and didn’t. Perhaps too busy cackling? More likely arguing over next, and trying to stay invisible instead of going for a coup-de-main when they might have had a chance.
In other words, they are afraid of us, for darn good reason, and are making decisions from fear, not confidence. Hint. Hint.
And now, the woodchippers are running, the swamp levees are breached, daylight shines in various formerly Darkside caves, and Trumpzilla is orange-blasting the swapcritters wholesale.
And he is just getting warmed up. As more and more of his team get confirmed, more and more hands are there to choke the living guano our of swampers. Epic.
Sure, Trump will pick a few zeros. He will likely be quicker to boot them too. And a few might be plants to give the Enemy some false “cracks” to exploit. They have certainly failed to wedge Musk from Trump. Lol.
The flailing at Tesla is likely another own-goal. Musk knows Tesla has run about as far as it can on subsidies and tax breaks. The market for electrics has imploded. Its a luxury item and the market is about saturated. So now, instead of taking a value hit for market reasons, tesla can say it is losing value/money due to the nincompoops and their tantrums. And that opens up lawsuits, RICO, and a possible recovery of significant amount from various LeftOrgs who will be / have been caught funding the nincompoops.
Way to go. Tag your #CosplayCriminalConspiracy in your commo. Stomp that rake good and hard. Throw Brer Rabbit into them thar briars. ROTFLMAO!
Folks, how can anyone despair of such a clownshow?
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They tried to go for the coup de mein. They couldn’t. Because the culture is no longer with them. All they could was wreck round the edges.
BE NOT AFRAID.
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They tried to cheat. They -didn’t- just say “because we have the guns/army/moxie”.
So no coup de main. Because they -know- they get their asses kicked, which is why they fear us so very much. Because more and more -we- know.
Our lack of fear is their -end-. They -cannot- function without fear in their victims.
“Be not afraid.”
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See the barbed wire around DC for months. MONTHS.
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I kept wondering when they were going to put in the guard towers and mine fields.
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I kept wondering why they wanted the optics of “We are in prison”.
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Defensive thinking. Fear response. They were trying to “castle out of check”.
Building camps and filling them with refusniks – that is offensive action. Shooting opponents en-mass.
Badmouthing versus real Terror.
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Coup de mein? I love Chinese food!
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Sarah typos. Movie at 11.
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Delicious typos
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Re Tesla, do not look past the fact that the Model Y is the best selling car in the world since 2023. There’s a market for BEVs, just not as much of one as the EU-centered brands hoped there was for high end luxury models.
The Cybertruck is a different story. If they’d done what Rivian did and built a Land Rover-ish normal midsized truck and SUV instead of a weird Jawa Sandcrawler truck they’d be selling like hotcakes. As it is I see more and more on the road out here.
Their big advantage over the old-school auto manufacturers is how far they are pushing efficiency and cost. They make a lot more margin on Model 3 & Model Y than Detroit does on their electrics (I think Ford is still losing money on every electric “Mustang”-thing they sell).
Don’t count Tesla out.
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I didn’t see many Cybertrucks before the attempted bombing of the Trump Hotel in Vegas – which failed to do much damage because bed of the truck absorbed so much of the the explosive impact.
A few weeks after that I started seeing more of them. Durability sells!
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Unless an electric truck can match an F350, the local market is going to be meh on them. In Flyover Falls, I’ve seen a grand total of 1 Cybertruck and 1 Rivian. A fair number of coal-fired cars, usually Teslas, and a few others. The cars seem to be mostly city-bound, though hybrids occasionally show in rural areas. (I believe that Subaru abandoned its eCar project. An AWD electric might be popular here, but it’s a niche demographic.)
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Cybertruck really not an F-150 competitor, more a slightly better than Honda Ridgeline or the little Ford unibody pickup (The Ford McCain? No, Ford Maverick – that’s the one) competitor with bonus bragging rights and actually pretty impressive tech underneath.
Then again, the Ford Lightening is not really a F-150 competitor either. I see a few of those around too.
I did see a Cybertruck with a contractor-rack with ladders up top the other day. It’s running something on the order of $30k cheaper than the Rivian truck, with aggressive lease and finance deals on offer due to it not selling so fast, so I can see a business use case making some sense.
It’s just so unattractive…
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Ridgelines are fairly popular around here. I have one, though towing a 16′ travel trailer is rather less than fun (plus range anxiety, what with 15 mpg and 16 gallon tank). It’s useful for medium sized loads, 8′ easy, 10′ with a flag. I can push up to 12′ with the 8′ utility trailer, though I try to avoid such. Longer than that, I pay for delivery. Almost miss the unreliable ’03 Chevy with the full sized lumber rack, but I don’t do that much construction any more.
Haven’t seen the mini Ford pickup. Fair number of 150 class trucks around (Ford, Toy or Ram; no GM dealers nearby because Obama), while the ranchers with critter/hay trailers go for the 250-350 class trucks.
The Fred Meyer (Kroger) has a Tesla charge station, so see a fair number of cars on charge. Haven’t seen any Cybertrucks soaking up that good coal juice, though courtesy the D edicts, new homes have to have the capability for home chargers. The generic charge station is downtown, where I seldom get to. The hospital has a couple of bays, and I assume there’s a few other public chargers around. I’ve seen an eMustang, but only the one. Lack-o-grill makes it look odd.
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Chevy Colorado isn’t meant to compete with the Chevy 1500, or even the Toyota Tacoma. Colorado is too light duty.
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I see a lot of them here (east metro Atlanta.)
But the first one i saw was less than a year ago in San Antonio. Walked up to it trying to figure out what it was
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Not at all.
But unless the Gov starts mandating the things, there just isn’t much more market beyond wealthy folks and pseudo-wealthy virtue signalers. And once there are thousands of old used Teslas on the market with worn down powerpacks, the effect snowballs.
I think Musk knows it. He has to see ahead. Maybe he has the Tess-10 / Effla-150 / Tess-U-Vee under wraps somewhere. maybe a novel way to shuffle batteries around, say a three-pack and a quick-swap rig for the garage, and it fits in the trunk for extended range. Hmmmm
But Tesla is due to experience the same “ouch” as the rest of the EV market, as trump isn’t going to be mandating the things, nor subsidizing them beyond tariffs on foreign ones.
Mature markets tend to shake out as two big dogs and maybe some small-fry. We likely wind up with Tesla (EV) and Toyota (hybrid), and some small-sales makers who never really make much, but stay in the game for prestige/recognition/fans.
EV and EV/ICE sports vehicles will likely remain a saleable niche, given the insane acceleration available for the EV – 100% torque from zero RPM. There were EV converted Yugos in the 90s that were drag-destroyers.
Again, no subsidies or super tax breaks, and no one forcing apartments to install free or discount chargers, then Joe/Jane Sixpack isn’t going “plug in” until owning a home. And maybe not then.
The Toyota “regenerative braking” hybrid winds up the surviving wide-use version. They correctly foresaw the future and bet heavily on it.
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You are not wrong. I remember when the automotive press was ragging on Toyota for not embracing the inevitable battery-electric future. Looks not so wrong now, huh?
And I forgot one good reason to buy a Tesla these days: It pisses off the Dems. I cannot imagine the depths to which the thousands and thousands of Model 3s and Model Ys seen in Silicon Valley every day in the commute must enrage the Elon-Derangement-Syndrome afflicted.
Local media is reporting on it now, taking a “Well, you can certainly understand why…” take, and with their TDS bias spooging through all over the place:
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/tesla-bay-area-backlash-grows-elon-musk-doge-trump-white-house
I like how that story talks about “sales are down in Norway” during the period since the inauguration, which happens to be when Tesla paused production to change all the factories over to the new version of the Model Y, without ever mentioning that possible reason.
Gee, sales down when production stopped for the model changeover before the new model of the best selling car in the world comes out. What could possibly be the cause? I know! DOGE!!
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An additional major problem for Tesla: Musk chose sides, the Right. His most loyal customers tended Left. He essentially has grossly offended his potential new customer base, and also annoyed many of the folks who might have been repeat customers.
Tesla may be a “Dead Firm Walking”. We will know in less than two years if he can finesse it somehow. He needs a “Bubba EV” and a “Conservative Chariot”. Or he has to kiss major Left fundament.
Either he has to have a major drama fallout with Trump and heel-turn Left, or he needs to start marketing MAGA-mobiles. Or, sell it off and focus on SpaceX
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I see a lot of Tesla’s locally. We see the cyber truck frequently too. Latter isn’t the only vehicle on the road I think is ugly. One of the more uglier.
We even see Tesla’s when we travel areas we know have limited slow chargers, and lord help you if the weather changes and get stranded.
I mean it actually makes sense to have a quiet electric motor when trolling for wildlife with a car. But I won’t trust an EV. A non-plugin-hybrid, yes. Otherwise, nope.
We looked at hybrids when we replaced my car, because I don’t drive much or far, anymore. But nothing, absolutely nothing, made sense financially.
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When we got new neighbors (early 2018) one of their cars was a Prius. Didn’t get much winter use, and it’s recently been replaced by a top-line Forester. IMHO, the Subie is a perfect fit for the area, and over here, you don’t get the Lesbian-with-a-dog vibe so common in Medford. (Guess how that dealership markets…)
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LOL The Lesbians with Dogs I know are mostly Jeep-ers.
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Tangent-to-topic:
Was it Steve Jobs who first inflicted the “built-in battery” on us? So it takes special tools and techniques to replace without fear of bricking it? Because doing it that way was soooo much more
lucrativeInnovative than JUST CHANGING THE FERSHLUGGINER BATTERY? LIKE WE DID WITH EVERY OTHER BATTERY SINCE TIME BEGAN???Hey, Elon! Standardize the form factor for car batteries and make them hot-swappable: the car parks over the lift, which rise to meet the old battery; the car releases it and it’s lowered away to be recharged; the new one rises, the car locks it in place and drives away. IDK why the whole job, billing included, should take more than 30 seconds. Quicker than filling a tank.
Of course there’s a ton of cost already sunk into the never-sufficiently-damned “built-in battery” idea.
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The reason is absurdly simple and not even nefarious: it’s cheaper to manufacture the widgets with integral batteries.
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I assume by “widgets” you mean the cars. Yeah, it would cost extra to build them with robot-swappable batteries like that. OTOH, “range anxiety” and “it takes ridiculously long to fill ‘er up for another 200-300 miles” are two major barriers to consumer acceptance of EVs. Fixing that would be well worth adding $1k or so–like, 3%?–to the production cost.
If you mean “Apple Widgets”, I say, with respect,
BSCitation Needed. Sure, just the battery, without a dedicated compartment (and the wall-thickness thereof) would shave a few cubic millimeters and a penny or two off the (slave labor) production cost of those ‘pads and ‘pods.It strains credibility to say that that’s why Jobs did it, and that furthering Apple’s “closed universe” business model–you gotta pay an Genuine Apple Genius™ to install an Genuine Apple Battery™ or your warrantee’s void–wasn’t his primary reason.
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The bigger the battery, the harder to swap as a module.
“Pull the cowl, swap the pack, replace the cowl” might work.
Drop from under has all the running gear in the way. But “up” probably works quickly enough.
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What running gear you talking ’bout? There’s no driveshaft, and if there’s a tranny under there, I bet “Hey-hey! Ho-ho!” were its last words.
Anyway, whatever the best design turns out to be, it needs doing, stat. Short range and long “refill” times–and a “gas tank” that shrinks a bit with every recharge–just won’t work for American drivers.
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Idiot Leftroids: vandalizing Teslas has no effect on Elon Musk. Tesla has already sold them and gotten the money. You’re only punishing people who bought Teslas long before Elon became an Enemy Of The People.
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Just read a story, over on Insty I believe, about a leftroid sooper genius who managed to set himself ablaze while using beer-bottle Molotov cocktails to attempt to ignite a Supercharger station.
I mean, self immolation is a long standing though extreme protest method, and Tesla does own those stations, but still…
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All we can do is encourage the practice. Without damage to any property, of course. :twisted:
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IANAL, but…
18 U.S. Code § 2331 defines domestic terrorism as:
Arson being definitely an “act dangerous to human life” and in violation of criminal laws in all U.S. States, and burning these vehicles and charging stations and storefronts, from the verbal statements and graffiti scrawling of the perps, appears to be intended to intimidate civilians AND influence the government by intimidation or coercion, so it looks like it qualifies to me.
Lets look at the the penalties, from 18 U.S. Code § 2331 section (c)(1), are:
Thus, for anything where anyone gets seriously hurt, 30 years in Federal Prison; Setting fire to that Tesla store, Tesla vehicle (a “conveyance”), or Tesla Supercharger station (as either a structure or real property), 25 years; for attempting or conspiring, same penalties as above; and for threatening to do so on Zuckerbook or X or Reddit or wherever, 10 years in Federal Prison.
So aside from the idiots self-immolating, getting them on record and then proceeding with the legal system should be entertaining as all get out.
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And it is my understanding that the dude who zippo’d himself has, by committing criminal assault with a dangerous weapon (Molotov cocktail, 1 ea., lit) which resulted in serious bodily injury (to himself), qualified himself right into 18 US Code § 2331 (c)(1)(D) charges in the 30 year sentence territory as long as he survives.
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Note the penalty sections I skipped are the ones applying to using WMDs.
Source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2331
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If you see someone prepping a Molotov, and shoot the glass instead of the Ass, what’s the call Counselor?
(grin)
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“Worst case of suicide we ever saw.”
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Reminds me of the Burn Loot Murder protester over in Fayetteville back in 2020…tried to burn down a historic building there that’s called the Old Slave Market (because, hint, it was) with an improvised Molotov.
He used a paper plate instead of a bottle.
Guess what happened.
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Like the guys who try it with plastic pop bottles? Don’t do that. Abide by traditional glass – the old ways are best. (Not that I am encouraging anything along these lines, nor do I condone it. I merely state what was observed on video.)
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Wrong. You’ve misidentified the target. The target is the guy who hasn’t bought a Tesla YET. It makes him ask the question: “Does owning a Tesla (for whatever reason) outweigh the low but non zero chance that I (or my family) will encounter some lunatic Leftroid who will attempt to harm us because they’re pissed at Elon, especially if I’m living somewhere I’LL be the one prosecuted for self-defense? Nope nopity nope!”
Nor will they replace their current Tesla with another one.
That scenario, incidentally, is why Elon is being sued by Tesla shareholders for failing his fiduciary duties by engaging with DOGE outside his “primary job” as Tesla CEO.
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I hope I don’t offend anyone here by this, but….
Remember when PJ Media was Open Sores? I do. I thought we had an opportunity to get in the game of media ourselves, making our unheard voices heard. I had a townhall site page, and I think somewhere else. Eventually, all the people who created pages were locked out by the “pros.” Seems like they became gatekeepers themselves, only wanting approved “conservative” voices to be on their pages.Or, ones that could make money. How many turned out to be controlled opposition/never Trumpers?
I may never have had much to contribute to the discussion, as my blogspot site traffic was able to attest, but, I shouldn’t have been shut out of the conversation. Look at them now. You have to pay to even read the comments! Yeah, I know it costs money to run the site, but a membership to leave comments is different than making you pay to just read. You can read the articles, why not the comments? Unfortunately, that’s why I usually skip links to PJ sites. The could run ads instead.
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Eh. Ads online turn out not to work. Which is why they’re in search of getting what we do pay.
BUT you didn’t need PJM for open source (And no, I didn’t remember that. I wasn’t paying attention to them at the time.) There’s blogs. We still don’t know how to make this pay. It might be the only way is what I do — fundraisers — which works best individually, and you’ll have superstars and the nothing, but that’s normal for commentariat and entertainment.
Why are you waiting for someone to give you a platform? CREATE one, and march on.
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Between X and Substack, there’s a record number of independent commentators driving the conversation right now. And the really popular ones are even getting paid.
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Precisely. You don’t need a bigger site to subsidize you. I started this blog when told that NO ONE could get a following in blogs any longer. Apparently they were wrong.
Some time ago Jeff Greason told me the space program needed to reset to be American. NASA was never American, but leftover German big-government. What we’re seeing with private space is the reset.
I have a feeling we need the same for the arts and culture. We need a reset, and to return to entrepreneurs striking out. Because the concentrated cultural feeders were never natural. They were just the control of culture by the left.
So, strike out on your own. You may fail. You may succeed. Who knows? But to TRY is the American way.
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Exactly. An Army of Davids, to borrow a phrase.
RE: Books and comics. I agree that a new distribution platform would be a game changer. So far it’s all been piggybacking on platforms like Amazon, IndieGogo, and Patreon without really solving the problem of what Publishing 2.0 is going to look like.
Right now, there’s no single platform that has all of good usability, good publication/monetization, and good network effects. Amazon comes closest, but you have to feed the Algorithm to really get ahead. The other platforms work if you’re willing to build an audience yourself and then point them at your sales page, but they’re not a full ecosystem the way Amazon and X are.
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Amazon is reaching the tipping point were their multitude of down checks overwhelms their “everyone knows them.”
Now, don’t get excited, that means they have ten to twenty years. But it’s time for the new thing to warm up in the pen.
I have this idea for a linked set of independent author stores, with promo, etc. I need to annoy Charlie with it again. Or my husband. If my husband weren’t working crazy hours, it would help.
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It might be worth looking at the teething pains of Mastodon/Fediverse. Setting aside their politics, they went with a decentralized model that ran into two main issues: (1) complicated systems that made it hard to hop between sites and (2) onboarding new users, helping them discover sites they like, and retaining them. The latter was so bad there were even a few academic papers on how to improve it.
Not that online storefronts are going to have the exact same problems as a network of social media sites, but usability and discovery are big.
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It’s so hard to find things on amazon that aren’t cheap crap from China.
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Other than kindle, yes. And there’s a bunch of books on kindle that are Chinese scammer pirated versions of American books…. Sigh.
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Haven’t been on FB yet this morning for dose of video scrolling. Bunch yesterday hit from some in Canada. Not favorable to Canada. Mostly commentary on one topic or another, including Tariffs. But one was a skit on Americans physically invading Canada to make them become the 51st state. Started with stating that the area populace must vote on becoming a state, the petition the US to become a state (which is why Puerto Rico, etc., are still territories, they keep voting down statehood). The video was the panic of the average Canadian protecting themselves from the invasion with baseball bats, because Canadians were unarmed by their government. Noting BTW that Americans, in particularly, their closest neighbors, along most the border, you know – Western Washington, Idaho, Montana, N. Dakota, etc., in particular – are NOT unarmed of their freedom seed delivery systems.
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Canadians have a fair number of useful sporting rifles, just nowhere near as many of the ugly ones. A bunch of annoyed yokels with five shot bolt-guns in large caliber can run your whole day. Especially if they are organized and skilled.
And the last time we tried to take Canada didn’t go very well. (gin)
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I imagine that there are still many tens of thousands of Lee-Enfields floating around in the Great White North. Ten rounds of .303 is nothing to sneeze at, especially in the hands of people who were raised with them.
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(snif)
I tried, but nobody read me. :( Then I got swamped by Chinese bots.
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Well, one thing is to put up something EVERY DAY. I know it sucks. (TRUST ME ON THIS.) The other is to be yourself as hard as you can.
I’m letting my paid substacks languish, and need to get back to that, now health is on ht upswing again…..
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Blocklist all foreign IP addresses, and most of the bots go bye-bye. You can then selectively add to your safelist ones you want.
If your host platform cant do it, you can put yoru domain/site behind a “Web Application Firewall” like Imperva. (Highly reccommend)
https://www.imperva.com/products/web-application-firewall-waf/
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All good points Sarah. Let me add one observation. Promotion is where we are struggling, and I’m not sure how to fix it yet.
There are so many who are helping promote books like Yourself, Larry Correia, David Buttler, Jeff Dunteman, etc. But your individual megaphone s only reach a few fans at a time.
Monday I took my family to the Theater to watch “Rule Breakers” which was an amazingly well done movie about a woman helping young women in Afghanistan learn about computers. The movie came out last Friday, and Monday there were a total of seven people in the theater watching the 5pm showing and five of them were my family. A friend who works for Angel Studios the distributor says it will probably be dropped by theaters due to poor viewership.
We need to find ways to get messages of all of the good media out there so people can consume it. But I don’t know what that is.
I do believe we will find a way though, and the results will be amazing.
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It may be that part of the problem is that a bunch of people – I’m one of them – won’t watch any movies because we’re trying to punish Hollywood, and don’t really care enough to figure out if one particular movie isn’t a Hollywood product.
Or we remember a night out at the movies being exorbitantly expensive and we don’t want to drop that kind of cash on two hours of “maybe a surprise lecture about how evil we are for not being minority flavor of the week”.
I mean… promotion is certainly a problem – one has to know a movie exists in order to deliberately boycott it – but it’s also possible that a lot of people have just given up on movies entirely.
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Ironic if the big tentpole movies Hollywood needs to keep the lights on are also needed for Hollywood’s competitors to keep the lights on.
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No. I think movies in the theaters is dying. Unless they come up with something we can’t have at home, they’re done for. Like paper books, they’re being done in by “More efficient means of delivery”. To get fixated on theater distro is like wanting to be on barnes and noble bookshelves. At best its’ a distraction.
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Tradpub has been facing the same problem for a couple of decades.
What their customers want is entertainment. But tradpub isn’t selling entertainment; it’s selling paper. Entertainment is just how they monetize the paper.
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THIS. But now they have competition that’s easier to deliver and cheaper. I can buy an ebook in the middle of a sleepless night and be reading in minutes. That’s an advantage that you can’t beat, economically.
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My wife and I pretty much gave up on theater movies 10 years ago and went to streaming. We got tired of noisy audience, cell phone lights, and overpriced everything.
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We went to the movies twice a year the last two years. Which is more than we had the ten years prior.
We went because we got free tickets from our phone service. Which made it a “date” with popcorn, and the movie almost irrelevant. (Though the last one, Flight Risk, WAS good. Tense, but good.)
We used to go to movies as a friends-group thing, but movies were a lot cheaper and the popcorn was better. They’re too expensive, and the movies sucking doesn’t help.
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It’s been 15 years since we went. Last two outings were ruined by other attendees.
Theaters are overpriced, noisy, and a waste of time. Not to mention the modern product and food are inferior.
Now at home you can have a large screen, great sound, thousands of selections from the past 100 years, any food you like and can pause if someone needs a bio break. On the same large screen you can play games which offer equal or better entertainment.
Plus I never understood the goal of seeing a movie on opening night/week when it will be available within a few months to view at home. Is it going to go stale? Friends rude enough to spoil the one stupid scene? Heck, the trailers give all the good bits away anyway.
If I get sick enough to lay on the couch or the spouse wants date night, we can spin up Plex on the home media server and access her insane collection of flicks and shows. Don’t even need a dog sitter for the pup.
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There are a few movies that are worth seeing in theaters, either for the sound/visuals (Blade Runner 2049 was gorgeous) or for the experience of seeing it with other people (the pop-off for Avengers: Endgame on opening night was incredible).
The problem is that those movies are few and far between, while all of the other ones are facing stiffer and stiffer competition from streaming and home media. As much as I love catching random movies in theaters, the theaters are looking pretty anemic these days.
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Locally there is no way to walk up to a window and get movie tickets. Must order online, or at the kiosk out front using a credit or debit card. We haven’t been to a movie in at least 2 decades.
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Hmm. The last time $SPOUSE and I were in a movie theater (disregarding the old movie palace repurposed for (mostly) live events. We haven’t gone to their movie nights.) was when we were still living in San Jose. So, maybe 2003.
The last new movie we bought was Happy Feet on DVD. Started OK, then came the plastic-trash sucker punch. Finished the movie, quietly vowed never again, and donated it to the local library branch. (Poorish county, very poor $TINY_TOWN. Of course they took it.) We’ll buy Brit Mysteries, and I have half of The Two Towers and RotK, as well as Firefly and Serenity in the TBW stack.
We got out of the habit of movies, period. Lawrence of Arabia might have been good, but we bailed a half hour in. IIRC, we wanted faster pacing. An American mystery (Bones) is 45 minutes, and the Brit mysteries (Vera, Morse, Lewis, Midsomer Murders) are 90, and that’s now my limit of sitting and watching. I can read for extended times, or do VWRC news/comment, but movies need motivation.
OTOH, when I travel (now much less often than during happy fun medical adventures), I can find that block of time. Twice a year, now. Have a trip in two weeks, so maybe work on the TBW stack.
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Be warned, Serenity is not the resolution I wanted to see. I tend to see it as not canon. Though it has its moments.
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I have a ways to go. I’m halfway through the pilot of Firefly. Seeing half a show and waiting months to resume seems to be a talent. Shrugs.
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The shift from a Western in space, to a superhero origin story in space is enough to give you whiplash. The segue is very abrupt. And the genre conventions invoked are in direct conflict.
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But the Serenity always were heroes, wherever they went. The movie finale brings a lot of the prior episodes together. They had two choices, what happened, or run, hide, and eventually get caught and killed. Latter wouldn’t have been as satisfying. I did not find the segue abrupt at all. Granted if they hadn’t been cancelled, the process would have been drawn out. As it is, should they gotten another season, like say Stargate original (3 series ending seasons), then back to the cowboy in space theme, because those in power aren’t just rollover, not fight back, to refute the truth.
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My issue was certain…..personnel issues.
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I somehow managed to watch Serenity before Firefly, so I’m legally barred from weighing in here. That said, it was good enough to get me to go back and watch the show. Holy cow, what a cast.
Kind of an interesting contrast to the other great Space Western show Cowboy Bebop, where the show has a definitive ending and the movie is basically one last adventure with the crew.
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Last movie I saw in theatres was Godzilla Minus One. Which was admittedly worth it but its telling there hasn’t been anything that’s even slightly tempted me since.
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G-1 and the TopGun sequel were the only two that tempted me to brave theaters again, but life intervened. Still waiting to see G-1 make it out where I can watch it on my big flat it-doesn’t-have-any-tubes-anymore tube.
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You make good points on how a lot have tuned out Hollywood and also stopped attending theaters due to costs.
Angel Studios is a crowd funded / directed production group that operates outside of the traditional Hollywood system. I think of them as kind of a Kickstarter for movies.
This was the first time I’ve taken my family to the theater in fifteen months. It’s a real hurdle. But if the awesome products don’t get traction we lose can lose.
I bring it all up more as an example of we need to find ways to boost products to wider audiences, and I don’t know the right way for that to happen.
I strongly suspect that mainstream medias willingness to boost products really was the result of invisible kickbacks and favour’s. A classic case being NY Times best selling political biographies that are best sellers but somehow most copies are remainderd six months later.
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I wouldn’t mind going to the local theater. Supposedly they did a bunch of really great upgrades. But, as you say, no supporting Hollywood and being sure of not is a trick, so… and I’m not a fan of crowds.
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I’ve got good news about that last part…
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I’m sorry to hear that. Their movie Cabrini did pretty well last year, and the only complaint I heard about it was it was a movie about a nun that never showed her praying. Which is a pretty mild complaint for a biopic.
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One of my constant complaints about “mainstream” stories these days (i.e. NY publishing and Hollywood) is that they have limited the “allowable” range of story themes to just a handful that fit the narrative. There are all kinds of themes that they just won’t touch. Which has resulted in a gray goo sameness to so many of the “mainstream” stories. It’s all about the oppression and the identity crap and the ridiculous girl bosses (which is apparently really distorting the perceptions of young women to the point that they *argue* when you try to mildly say that men are much stronger than women).
Somebody (I forget who… might have been my husband) said that the one thing that Marxism is kind of good for is as story fodder. But they wore out that vein long ago.
I do really hope that Hollywood dies and that all the new technologies that make it easy to create video results in the equivalent of indie fiction in film.
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I found out via one of the legends of trad sf, on a panel, that you now can’t create flawed female protagonists. It’s misogynistic, you see?
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Current word from those dealing with the studios is there is a literal written rulebook that the “suits” enforce as “production notes” on anything at the development stage – stuff like that “no flawed females”, the various “add a <blank> – one of these and one of those, but none of those” changes, the “no white males can be competent” one, the “stronk female fighter easily physically overcomes guys no matter how big they are” one, and even detailed prescriptions on what can and cannot happen in character arcs.
Enforcing the same rules on everything yields everything being the same grey goo. It is no surprise nobody is watching anymore.
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Wow. They really wrote the stupid rules down in a book? I mean, you can guess pretty much that they existed by the results, but I’m kind of surprised they wrote them down. I suppose to them they’re so obviously virtuous and admirable that they would see no reason not to record them.
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My guess is the execs kept getting it wrong, missing this one or that one, even after they attended the mandatory diversity, equity and implosion training, so they finally just handed them the list.
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Implosion! I love you SO MUCH.
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The whole point of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was that it was supposed to be surprising that the little blonde chick could be a super-strong fighter. Now it’s so common that more than half of the point is lost.
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“Do you wat to watch this movie? The princess knows kung fu.”
“Dad, all the princesses know kung fu”
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And the same guy did the same thing with River Tam in Firefly. Yeah, would not be at all surprising now.
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Yeah.
River Tam as a psyker, mind reader, precog, stealther would have been cool.
“River Of Blood Tam, the Combat Monster, Bane of a Hundred Reavers!” was just YGBFSM! No. Just no.
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Yep, we’re in the second season of Bones and her beating up a 250 pound thug might have been Fresh! Minty! [sorry, stole that from a CSI episode] at the time, but the little I see of $CURRENT_SHOWS that’s more like Stale! Fishy! Eww!.
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Oh, for crying out loud. Institutionalized Mary Sue. (The question of how many Mary Sue’s should be institutionalized is left to the audience’s judgement).
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Marxism isn’t good story fodder. It’s limited and flat. And yes, overmined.
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I’ve mentioned I’ve migrated to YouTube music for most of my music needs. Looking at my 2024 recap was wild. Lots of Guy in a Garage rock music, foreign semi-pro Asian groups of all different generes, some scandanavian heavy metal groups that never broke in here, and one group that I can only figure is a creative side hobby for a bunch of professional gig musicians.
The closest thing in there to the major labels is a side project of a group that ended up self publishing because the label that signed them imploded.
Some of them have millions of views. Some of them have a few thousand. But there is great stuff out there. It’s just not always seen.
I’m a little sad the Yonder Voice stuff seems to have so few views. Kiss and Euthanasia has only like 2.8k views and was my #3, so it’s pretty likely a substantial fraction were just my own. :/ (That’s one of the Asian groups. From what I can understand from the context, I think it is it about the death of memory, i.e. the forgetting of things you may or may not have wanted to remember, but I still haven’t tracked down a translation of the lyrics to be sure.)
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we do need to open up the book market. Not sure how, but I’m THINKING.
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I wonder if pattern seeking AI could be used to surface books people could be interested in?
As in, you feed the books you’ve read and like into it, and it pulls potentially interesting stuff out of its slush pile.
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I want to start a site that does that. Have I mentioned I’m being hampered by my lack of ability to program?
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You might already know this, but the cheap trick that Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify use is “collaborative filtering”. The idea is to recommend things that other people who like the things you like also like. This works disgustingly well, given that it doesn’t need to understand anything about the thing it’s recommending, but it suffers from the cold start problem for new users and new items it have any info on.
I’m not sure what the state of the art is on content-based techniques, but I can see something based on LLM summaries/targeted questions working reasonably well. Might take some finagling to get something reliable, though.
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If they are not already running that in background at some level I would be shocked, since they already have LLM AI summarizing reviews. Once you get the first thing working, subsequent things are a lot easier.
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All online shopping/streaming services really need a “never show me this again” option.
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Oh yes, and also an optional follow-up question “Why?” so that you can say “I don’t want to see this author,” or “I don’t want to see this genre,” or “I don’t want to see this keyword,” or “I don’t want to see any more books with covers where the characters are showing more skin than clothing, because I’ve learned that that’s a signal for a style of novel I don’t enjoy.”
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Prime video has a feature that pretends to be this when you’re browsing the suggestions, but a couple refreshes later it shows right back up again, which irks me greatly.
Or the ones where you started it, noped it five to ten minutes in, and now they keep pushing you to finish it or try things like it. Look, I already regret even making it past the opening credits, folks, please don’t keep reminding me of my mistake!
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Or at least an option to say “I don’t like this, that’s why I stopped watching it, please remove the “bookmark” you’ve kept of the point where I stopped and never recommend this to me again.” It’s not like this is hard to do, or even hard to think of the idea. I can only conclude that they’re not doing it because they don’t want to receive negative feedback. Just like Youtube removing the thumbs-down numbers and no longer showing them because they didn’t like what the numbers showed (that people disliked wokery), I suspect Amazon of the same thing. They don’t want to know that people dislike their shows, so that they can continue to tell advertisers “13 million people watched this show” without having to say “… and 11 million of them quit watching after episode 1 and told us to never show this to them again.”
At some point, the willful ignorance of people’s dislike of your stuff reaches the point of flat-out lying to your customers (the advertisers are the ones I consider their “real” customers here, since the money they get from Prime subscribers will not fluctuate based on whether people dislike one particular show), which is actually illegal. Has it reached that point in law? Probably not, or not yet: the argument that “someone of ordinary prudence would have done this thing” is difficult to make, for good reason. But at some point it will reach that point. And as far as my opinion is concerned, it has already reached that point. Anyone who doesn’t allow me to say “I dislike this, don’t show this to me again” is doing so on purpose and is not going to produce trustworthy results from their algorithms.
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YT does seem to honor thumbs-down for how they populate their “recommended” queue, at least for me, but they pay no attention to not opening something that’s been in there for bloody weeks.
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Oh, Lord, YES.
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I find that the Amazon algorithms tend to herd me into a few sub-genre cul-de-sacs, and totally miss for months books that I’d love to have known about.
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I pretty much ignore Amazon “suggestions” for everything, including books. I have a list of about 3 dozen authors I do an “Advanced Search” on once a month, and it gets updated occasionally, usually based on Our Gracious Hostess’ posts on Sunday or something I happen to notice elsewhere. The ones I’m interested in get added to my Wish List, marked highest priority, and I set yellow stickies (the 3M utility) to flag me when they are released. And I always check Baen for the same books before I buy them (plus others), since they don’t charge sales tax.😉
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That would be useful, given my “Amazon recs” are often… well, I do a lot of marking out of things, and SF hardly ever shows up despite my buying SF!
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“Right now all the people who pay big money for artists and creatives, and productions, and movies, and all that are on the left.”
Which is interesting in itself as if you look at the net worth of the members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats are fairly evenly represented from top to bottom. Granted, these are politicians, and generally compete with each other for how ostentatious they can be, and who can buy the most expensive bad art. The real question is, “What do members of the Right do with their discretionary income if they don’t spend it on art?”
My biggest objection to Amazon and Kindle is how quickly your access can go poof. And the lack of customer service in getting your stories back.
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Your last paragraph? That’s my biggest reason for insisting on dead-tree versions. If I can’t get it on paper, I just can’t get it.
My library is right there. My access is walking over to the bookshelf. The batteries never die, they never brick, the company never goes bankrupt….(well, they might, but once the volume is clutched in my hands that’s irrelevant)
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I mostly can’t READ on paper anymore. Something with my eyes. Also, ebooks wins. Sorry. Economically the format with lower delivery costs wins.
We just need to figure out what comes after Amazon. (And I wish Amazon would spin off just the book sale business, away from all the bullshit.)
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They managed to cripple the digital comics market by buying up the largest platform (Comixology), rolling it into Kindle, and doing it poorly enough that it was a huge step backwards for digital readers. Not sure if they’ve done anything to fix that in the last couple of years, but Amazon as a whole seems to smother smaller industries just by rolling over. No clue what the solution is.
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Yeah. I know. The problem is that Amazon sucks, but the other platforms are WORSE.
for comics? We need to start something new. Look, we’ll see. I have plans. And a marked lack of time. BUT I have plans.
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Same model Microsoft, Oracle, etc. use in the software space. And Amazon is as much an IT provider as anything else these days.
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Yeah, but it’s not all of it. Look, as someone who worked from the other side publishing indie since 2011, Amazon had the most friendly, self-explanatory way of putting things up. It’s gotten a little more complicated, but the other platforms drive me nuts.
Amazon has the most transparent statements, too. AND even now the best search algorithm for buying. Barnes and Noble is stupid and bizarre to the point you can’t find the thing, even armed with title and author name.
…. it’s not…. well. Yes, they buy and destroy small competitors. Yes, I hate it as much as the rest of you do. BUT the reason they dominate is still there.
AND that’s where they need to be beaten by innovation. (Will they buy us? Not if we’re innovative enough. There’s a level at which they don’t see the danger coming. Like bookstores didn’t see Amazon coming.)
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B&N did this. I had book purchased out of 4 different sites, including Baen, under the pre epub format. All got purchased by B&N. I had all the books downloaded. I think it was 5 years before the books were converted and integrated into my Nook B&N library. But they did do this.
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Which if I was using Kindle Unlimited, is fair. But I am not. I am buying the eBooks. Right now Epubor is not working with Kindle PC downloads, again. Downloading an older version of PC Kindle books doesn’t work, because then I can’t download the books. Solution – avoid buying Amazon Kindle eBooks. I buy eBooks either direct or through Nook, which Epubor still works on. Prejudice toward the .epub because started with that format way back before dirt was formed in the early days of ebook (late ’90s). But really do not care. What I do want is the *drm removed, and stored in my e library in Calibre, where Amazon/Nook can’t reach. Reading outside of Kindle or Nook on my Android phone is a PIA, but doable. Outside of Kindle or Nook on the PC, Calibre works.
(*) I know a lot of authors like Sarah list their books without drm. Near as I can tell? Amazon is ignoring that.
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It’s not that Amazon is great. It’s that EVERY OTHER EBOOK PLATFORM SUCKS WORSE. That is the problem. You want writers to turn their back on Kindle? Create something that’s easier for them to get on, and easier for customers to buy from. Screaming at people that the game is rigged has NEVER unrigged the game.
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Programmatically it looks like a fairly basic web store problem set. There are a dozen off-the-shelf packages ready to serve up search, product pages, take your money, and host customer reviews. The infrastructure is relatively simple; there are only a handful of paper vendors to deal with, and a zillion self-publishers that are all electronic. The customers are there.
There have been a few weak attempts, but it comes down to two main problems: everyone has an account with or at least knows about Amazon. Investors typically don’t want small but reliable returns; they mostly seem to be concerned with throwing wads of money at what has been presented as the next Great New Thing.
In the end, books are a niche product. They’re not going to get investors to go into a gambling frenzy.
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It was the tax problem that kept me on Amazon, and B&N’s IP grab on the last-but-one Nook contract. No, it is MY IP, not yours!
Even GumRoad has a few problems with managing foreign sales taxes and VAT as well as all the US sales tax possibilities. I did a WIBBOW check, and the accounting and collection costs for all the sales taxes, VAT filings for overseas, and the like ate not only my book income but possibly part of my DayJob income as well. I can’t manage that right now.
I’d like to go wide again some day, but for now? No.
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Yep. All of that. Shoppify apparently helps with the tax thing.
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True. Which is why I do not scream. I buy Kindle books. I just avoid buying them on Kindle if Epubor is not working on Kindle books, if they are available on Nook, or other source. Do the same if Epubor stops working on Nook too. I don’t play favorites.
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I was able to adapt when Amazon removed the “Download and transfer via USB” option last month. I locked-in (auto updates OFF) Kindle for PC version 2.40.xxx, bought EPubor, and had no problem converting a book I bought on the March 4th. It’s now in Calibre, and I always convert so I have both AZWx and epub versions. I always keep my Kindle in airplane mode and add books to it from Calibre via USB. I never sync anything. It all works fine. As long as I have 15 minutes after I buy the book and download it to Kindle for PC, there’s no way for anything to go “poof” other than from my Kindle library, and I really don’t care about that once it’s in Calibre.
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What I do too. Neither Kindle nor Nook will take away what I’ve bought. No matter how little I paid for it.
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We really, really need a platform for books and comics like Steam, which got started early enough that Valve cornered a monopoly and they have been very uninterested in playing games with buyers, beyond restricting blatantly adult/erotic content and enforcing local copyright laws.
(And even the adult content issue can be gotten around if the company sells a patch on their own website to change things.)
The problem is that the gatekeepers are still there for a lot of things. And their gatekeeping policies make eBook platforms worse. Marvel and DC are notorious for underpaying artists and writers, but they are the only game in town for anyone who wants to sell comics outside of the very narrow niches(1) if they don’t have a culture-busting concept. Being an independent publisher is rough, especially if you’re working on a shoestring-and most of the mainstream publishers won’t even look at you if you’re not trying to sell your story to their staff of urban white, middle-class, college-educated liberal-to-Marxist women who are selling their books to aspirational white, middle-class, college-educated liberal-to-Marxist women.
I want there to be more options and some filtering and help with new authors trying to get into the market. The job that publishers used to provide. Going through indie books has the feeling of going through the Amazon remainders stores that have popped up, buying Amazon returns in bulk and encouraging people to go through them to find useful things.
(1-The niche, it seems, is yaoi/yuri romantasy hentai with a distinct hatred or loathing of heterosexuals. Bonus points if you can throw in BIPOC or “marginalized” communities in there, with the marginalized on top/in charge of whites.)
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But people writing gay hentai used to have stories of some nature, and definitely they had flawed protagonists. Often flawed in the same exact ways, but definitely they weren’t bland like Marvel gay people.
(Yes, yes, I read the back of cereal boxes if I don’t have anything else; so every so often I’d skim M/M fanfic stories by people I knew, or who were getting praised.)
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The great irony of the diversity push at Marvel and DC is that the various checkbox identity groups got worse characters and stories “representing” them than if the editors had kept their thumbs off the scales. See circa 2017-2019 ComicsGate videos on YouTube for a good breakdown.
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This. “Steam for books/comics” seems like the Holy Grail, although Sarah’s idea of a network of independent storefronts has some merit too. Steam has been a remarkably benevolent monopoly so far, and I hope that never changes.
The comic book industry frustrates me. As far as traditional Western comics go, there are three spheres: Marvel and DC (mostly captured; ate their seed corn), the smaller publishers (mostly captured, with islands of sanity; not selling a lot), and crowdfunding (actually independent, but unreliable and format-limited).
Meanwhile, manga sells gangbusters for concepts as wildly divergent as pirate fantasy, superhero action, Roman bath time travel, cooking, fishing, and every flavor of romance you could imagine. So it’s not the medium. It’s the quality of the stories and the lack of trust. Meaning we could fix it with the right talent and a way to get people buying again.
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Epubor worked for me just now. [Puzzled]
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Nope. Not working.
Kindle version: 2.7.1
Epubor version: 3.0.16.105
PC Kindle open. Books needing to be drm, un-downloaded, then re-downloaded.
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Kindle For PC 2.3.0 (70904)
Epubor Ultimate v3.0.16.327
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Thanks!
Found a 2.3.x version and installed it.
Upgraded Epubor, again (still says .105 build, so ???).
Worked! All caught up. Now I can remove those backlog books from the “2 to decript” collection!
Most are Free to $1.99 on sale, that I probably will never read again. BUT a few are not. Besides. I bought them. I did not rent them.
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That’s it. EPubor says that their DRM removal won’t work on books downloaded via Kindle for PC versions later than 2.40.xxx.
Good to know you got it working!
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Can I install Epubor on a Linux machine using Wine? Anybody done this? TIA for info!!
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If I had to install anything on anything, I’d use whiskey.
What?????
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The name WINE is a typical programmer’s joke, a recursive acronym: it stands for “WINE Is Not (an) Emulator”. True to its name, it is not an emulator, but rather an implementation of the Win32 APIs on Linux. Since that sentence probably flew over the heads of most non-programmers, what that means is that it allows you to download Windows programs and run the .exe files on Linux. They mostly work, but sometimes something fails because the WINE project hasn’t gotten the implementation 100% right. When that happens, they ask you to report the bug, and if they can reproduce it (which usually translates to “if they can legally download the same .exe file without paying thousands of dollars for it”) then they’ll usually fix the bug in a later version.
Used to be that WINE could only run basic software, but apparently it can now run many games, opening up the possibility to play many classic games on Linux that used to be Windows-only.
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I figured — though I’d never run across it, which considering who I live with is amazing 00 it was just late and I HAD to make a stupid joke. It’s in my contract.
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I thought the joke was cute!
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Thank you!
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Mee too. And as someone who’s currently using miniatures to find the “best” Irish, Scotch and Tequila it resonated.😉😁😁
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I just did the research I should have done before asking. It seems the product is non-alcoholic.
But yes, it WAS a cute joke! ;-)
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The DeDRM plugin for Calibre can decrypt Kindle eBooks – at least, if you use the most recent alpha build.
Of course, just recently Amazon took away the “download and transfer via USB” option that let you get an encrypted download, so now you have to download to a physical Kindle, then attach the USB cable and pull the copy from its memory to your PC. I swear Amazon is trying to make everybody read ebooks only on their own hardware, and if some bright fellow figured out how to make the USB port work only for copying to the Kindle Amazon would roll it out forthwith.
At which point everyone would switch to Kindle Unlimited, because getting your own personal copy is the only benefit buying an ebook has over subscribing to Amazon’s lending library. (How much money does Kindle Unlimited earn, compared to ebook copies? Enquiring minds want to know…)
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You can use EPubor and Kindle for PC to decrypt books directly without going through the Kindle.
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“What do members of the Right do with their discretionary income if they don’t spend it on art?”
Tithe
Cars
Guns/ammo
prepper
nice house / improvements
Kids! Kids! Kids!
Books
Hobbies that involve making/fixing stuff, tools and supplies for same
-real- art
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Nah. We also do art. And watch art. The problem is that most of the “money on art” is government money. And it goes to the left. That spigot must be turned off.
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thus “-real- art”
I have a number of paintings on my walls. There are artists I support.
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I have a ton of science fiction art. Some of it is even mine. :D
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Same here – I bought paintings and prints by artists whose’ work I liked, and can stand to look at, every day, year after year. There is good art out there – but you do have to go searching for it, a little.
I so regret that I couldn’t afford some landscapes that I spotted, some years ago – a desert and mountain scene at an art gallery in old Albuquerque, and another, by a local Texas artist in a gallery in La Villita, in downtown San Antonio. Gorgeous work but I didn’t have a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket at the time…
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I feel you. I’d just spent money on what I’d planned on, and saw a magnificently painted and matted watercolor landscape with wildlife and a longhorn … for a reasonable-for-good-art price. Which was more than I could pay at the moment. SIGH.
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Don’t remember her first name (remember her husband’s, a coworker). I so wanted to buy the limited prints of the paintings she painted. The limited prints ran $800 – $1500, discounted for her husband’s coworkers. He had an 8′ x 10′ commissioned canvas oil hung in his office for months until the buyer finally agreed to the frame, and paid to have it safely shipped to Europe. The painting alone was $10,000 (FYI, this was 1991!!!!!!). Painting was a meadow with evergreen forest in the background. The limited prints were landscapes, and NW wildlife. (Artist died of cancer in the late ’90s.)
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Masterpieces in crayon by your kids? 😋
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Priceless.
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I can’t afford to pay for real paintings. Not even prints based off of real paintings. Have a lot of real paintings (different mediums) and photo prints on our walls. The paintings? All by relatives (most by grandpa and great-grandma, one or two from cousin, sister, and cousin once removed). The photos were taken by hubby. The photos are the only items we’ve sunk money into (cameras, printing, framing, or special printing).
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We’ve got a few prints of professional artwork- like this one:
https://www.zazzle.com/dawn_haiku_poster-228682866743577870
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Heh, and it’s by some person we’ve seen around here named Hogarth… :)
Yeah, that’s nice.
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She’s an amazing artist.
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:le shock:
I would NEVER have guessed that the Jaguar Business Lady was around here. Nor that she would have a space marine kimono print…. :grin:
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I want actual art. By actual artists.
Not…well, “Piss Christ” might be art, but if it makes a sixth-grade child giggle for more than thirty seconds…
I miss good commercial art, the stuff that you got in the ’50s and ’60s. Great book covers. Things that make us look a little more at things.
(And naughty stuff. Absolutely naughty stuff.)
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People on the Left apparently are doing a lot of money laundering; and doing it by grifting the US government for grants and such. So it’s not discretionary money, per se.
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Miss Sarah, that “artist” is more of an “autist”. Pay him and them no mind. In the words of an Admiral David Farragut, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”
How it happened:
1. Farragut’s fleet attacked Mobile Bay, one of the last open Confederate ports. The goal was to end the rebellion as soon as possible, not to “win hearts and minds”.
2. One of his ships, the Tecumseh, hit a “torpedo” (now called “mines”) in the bay because the ship’s captain either forgot or ignored instructions to avoid the known minefield. Proper planning and attention to the plan avoid unneeded losses.
3. Farragut recognized hesitation from his subordinate commanders. Real leaders know their teams.
4. He placed his flagship Hartford in the lead. Real leaders take risks.
5. He gave the order, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”. Clear instructions cut through the nervousness and restored their focus.
6. His fleet defeated the Confederate fleet and secured the bay. And we will win, too, if God wills.
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“Conservatives can’t/don’t write.”
Haha! What utter nonsense. There’s no room in marxism for nuance. Marxism in fiction is a parasite riding on a conservative story. All good stories deal with personal growth (or it’s tragic opposite). It’s easy to insert marxism into a traditional story. Look at Avatar–just make the villain evil capitalism instead of an anti-freedom, tyrannical government, and, voila, you’ve turned a traditional story into marxist propaganda.
In college I read a collection of Soviet Science Fiction for a class. It was depressingly bad. It was all flat, and everybody was perfect and ended up in happy paradise. That’s not life. To use one of the left’s phrases, it doesn’t match anybody’s ‘lived experience’.
As to the conservative resurgence in the arts, I highly recommend Taylor Sheridan’s many TV series. 1883, Landman, and Tulsa King are all top notch, and I ABSOLUTELY recommend 1923. If you want to see how to write strong female characters who are all still women not mock men, watch 1923!
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I picked up a book by a Russian author that SF reviewers (this was the 80s, I think) were touting for it’s daring originality. I read it and muttered, “This is standard Communist doctrine – the vaguely authoritarian, “gray,” state withers away when the young people turn their back on it en masse.“
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Yep, there’s no room for individuals in our “great socialist future paradise,” so no heroes no villains, no love, nothing but Zardoz. Not that that ever happens except in their vile, jealous fever dreams.
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To be fair, the left was never terribly good at memeing. I was recently reminded of their attempt to hit back at Rush Limbaugh in March of 2009, by deciding they’d put up a billboard in Cape Girardeau, MO, saying, “Americans didn’t vote for a rush to failure.”
This was the best pick out of 80,000 submissions. Yeah.
(Source: https://www.unz.com/author/michelle-malkin/2009/03/12/lamest-billboard-ever/)
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No. But they were doing something. We weren’t even started. Once we started we swamped them. Because they were not terribly good.
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They seem to always think in terms of Edifying the audience,” rather than making a point, plus being very, very serious. Frustrated atheist Sunday School teachers.
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Yep: Preaching.
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We weren’t doing it…but we sure learned FAST. And the left was not good at it at all, because they don’t understand humor. I forget who it was who said that the left has one insult (“So-and-so is STUPID!”) and one joke (“Hey, that so-and-so–isn’t he STUPID?”) but it was the most cogent encapsulation of leftist “humor” I ever saw.
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“Look, I’m sick and tired of the story that goes something like this: The right is more hidebound/rationalist/uninterested in art. This is why the left took over and conquered all the non-STEM fields, and why they now control the culture.”
Same. The part that gets under my skin is that no two commenters diagnose the problem the same way, and basically all of them are wrong. “The Right’s not creative because [made-up excuse].” “No, the Right gave up and walked away from [academia/Hollywood/etc.]!” “Art’s not a real job. Why don’t you do something with your life?”
No mention of the decades of gatekeeping, no serious attempt at promoting right-wing art despite complaining that the Right doesn’t promote its own, various flavors of arbitrary line-in-the-sand moralism. Crabs in a bucket.
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we just got hit by “Art doesn’t matter. We need science” on twitter. And I chose REAL word violence in return.
Which is why tomorrow’s post is being written as we speak. It might involve more violence, like outright mockery. But also an explanation of why “Choose STEM” is not the answer. And never was.
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I saw that. “When you’re not making culture, someone else will. And they’ll teach your kids to hate themselves.” is a money quote. Looking forward to the post.
I’m getting so sick of all the attempts to police people’s interests. The most recent one was Matt Walsh opining that the guy who just set an insane record in Guitar Hero should have used that time to learn the guitar instead. Let people have fun. Let them make money off it people find them entertaining. Stop trying to optimize everyone else’s time while carving out exceptions for the things you happen to like. It drives me nuts.
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Sure. And become just another of a few million so-so guitar players.
“Why spend all that effort to win the Daytona 500? Why not learn how to drive a bus instead?”
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THIS.
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And there is the real Puritan ethic, as laid out in Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, which confirmed that if C.S. Lewis recommended it I need to stay away.
According to Law, every waking moment should be dedicated to the Glory of God, either by reading edifying works or works instructing one how to perform acts of practical charity, performing those acts, prayer or possibly preaching. Period. He was especially down on wasting time at the theater or by driving without a specific destination in mind, and was mildly doubtful whether a man could be righteous and in business at the same time. It was terrifying.
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That’s the Ulster Protestant/Scots-Irish side of Lewis. Not his best side, honestly.
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There are plenty of non-left in Hollywood. In the closet. If they are not they don’t get the gigs.
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My fundraisers always get contributions from Hollywood zipcode. USUALLY anonymized in various ways. (Except for one.)
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If they’re going to continue beating conservative creators, how about a kick in the stern to launch us? At least then we would have some momentum….
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Another thing is that if your art is not explicitly political, there appears to be a high cost to being Out on the right, and a low cost to being Out on the left.
People, if you are looking at a music teacher for your kids, or an art teacher, or whatever, check their social media. Most of us are still on Facebook for promotional reasons at a minimum. Silent on politics doesn’t mean NotLeft, but the cost for being LoudLeft is so low that the odds are pretty good a silent on politics person is NotLeft.
Looking at the music teachers in my own social circle (I am one), the leftists post leftist stuff. A couple right wing post right wing stuff, but most of those I know are definitely right wing are silent on politics.
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THIS.
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Ssshhhh. Don’t let on that idea, or leftists will think that anyone who has a life outside of politics is a target. ;)
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That’s actually what happened, leading to the current pushback. Sarah’s talked about this before, but they expanded from attacking people who disagreed with them to attacking people who didn’t agree with them vocally enough. Thus destroying the incentives for their opponents to keep quiet and kicking off the preference cascade.
Keep alienating the middle, and eventually you don’t have many allies left.
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In Hollywood this effort was part of the witch hunt – making every loudly proclaim lockstep leftist dogma was to smoke out those in the closet, to purify (spellcheck want the word “putrify”) the industry
Same thing happened with metoo – early on there were fully made actresses who basically said “Suck it up, girlie – it’s just the way it is. Just don’t go into the Producer’s hotel room, you dolt.” and they were pilloried into “reframing” their statements in line with the current Maoist theme.
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Good point there. But I’m going to tag on for the visual arts and align with my standalone post. If the sculpture or the poster isn’t nauseating, if the music isn’t discordant and boring, your artist of choice is probably not irretrievably left.
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Now that USAID is being exposed and defunded you will find the playing field leveling up I should think. Because let’s face it, no one willingly pays for that trash the leftist “elites” call art. But I’ll buy cool pictures and sculptures and books until…Marie Kando, help!
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I hope. I think there’s other money being funneled in.
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The funding shock is revealing their priorities. They can’t afford everything they want in the short term, so they’re focusing on anti-DOGE protests and Palestine, hoping to get the most bang for their buck. Meanwhile, the MSM is going through massive layoffs, ESG is on life support, and a lot of the other protests/boycotts/publicity stunts are withering on the vine. DOGE is making them cut the dead weight.
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Anti-DOGE protests are obviously “Gentlemen, we have got to save our phony-baloney jobs!” So the interesting choice is Palestine – the only cause as important as access to free money is supporting people who want to kill Jews and make no pretenses of doing anything else.
You have to wonder how these people can face themselves in a mirror.
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Yeah, it’s curious. My top guesses are that it’s either coming from a separate funding source (the anti-Israel crew) or it’s their best hope of attacking Trump with something.
Right now, they’ve got the Reddit crowd hyping themselves up for another assassination attempt, anti-DOGE protests, a couple of Hail Mary legal cases, and that pro-Hamas protester who’s getting deported for causing a bunch of property damage. That’s a pretty weak hand, and Palestine is the only thing they can even attempt to spin as a winning issue, namely “free speech”.
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If they go after Elon they better have better ex-Navy SEALs than the crew of them that he hires…
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The bad guys only have to get lucky once.
Offence eventually overcomes defense.
But if -I- was a billionaire, the folks tormenting me would be wrong to assume themselves “untouchable”. No, not hardly.
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Apparently the right is angry enough to buy teslas to piss off the left….
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”The bad guys only have to get lucky once.”
Yeah, If I were him I’d be always wearing a vest, and have those sports coats he wears over his t-shirts all tailored with body armor as well.
The only time I’ve seen video of his departing some event with his close detail, before even the Twitter acquisition, his team had him in a ‘burban, which I assume was armored.
It’s not like he can’t afford it…
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Yep.
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There is of course but I note that we have some money people who are stepping up now who are well off but not evil. And so it will still be a wallet battle in some ways but better matched. IMO
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Actually saw a list (can I google for the list? Hell no.) of the “Trust Funds” (Trust Fund, probably wrong label), on Fox News earlier, funding the current Trump Tower take over. Now how are those funds being funded? Guarantied the one touted as a Soros front, isn’t being funded by Soros.
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They’ve still got the required reading lists…
Oh wait. 👹 Brad oh so viciously “attacked” that, by daring to question a “classic.”
https://x.com/BradRTorgersen/status/1899109036420899197
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Tom Clancy wrote military technothrillers. Herman Melville wrote commercial fishing technothrillers with a pinch of urban/religious fantasy.
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Actually, it’s pretty amazing that American literature contains more than one deathless example of a commercial fishing technothriller. And yet it does.
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Oh? What’s the other one? I’m sure once you mention it I’ll feel silly for not remembering it, but right now I can only think of Moby Dick. Unless you mean Stevenson’s Kidnapped!, or was it Captains Courageous; with both of them it’s been so long since I read them that I don’t remember which plot goes with which.
Moby Dick, BTW, is the first book I ever read where I said, “Actually, this would be better in an abridged edition.” Usually I find abridged editions to be heresy. But Moby Dick could be abridged very simply, by just publishing the odd-numbered chapters in one volume, and the even-numbered chapters in another one. (It’s slightly more complicated than that, but only slightly). Then you’d have one decent fiction novel about how revenge makes you blind to everything else, and one dry-as-whalebone treatise on the anatomy of whales and how whaling boats process whales after they’ve been caught.
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My husband actually liked Moby Dick. I should perhaps mention that my husband is dancing over the edge of neurodiversity, in the category of “well, we can’t quite untangle what’s going on enough to give you a specific diagnosis.” So I suspect that the whaling descriptions fit the itch for a detail-heavy deep dive.
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John Wright made the case that Moby Dick is a comedy: a pagan epic of old set in the most ridiculously commonplace setting imaginable. I still haven’t read the book yet, so I can’t vouch for his interpretation, but his analysis stuck with me. An excerpt:
“The humor is pagan: solemn Christians often scowl at pagan saturnalias, not seeing the grim and hopeless character that sits like iron underneath the outward frivolity, the gay bunting and amorous ditties. In MOBY DICK, Melville indulges in weird frivolities of language, explores odd ironies, or describes, tongue in cheek, common things in overblown heroic language, or heroic things in understated dry language. The delight of his rich inventions, the sheer giddy FUN of the thing, is the one thing no one ever told me about this book.”
https://scifiwright.com/2006/07/moby-dick-pagan-masterwork/
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*Well, if not a comedy, humorous.
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Moby Dick is magnificent. However, I think many great novels are better read after age 20, than before. So I’d recommend rereading classic novels you think you hated in school.
Billy Bud, however…
Commercial fishing technothrillers…
The Old Man and the Sea
The Perfect Storm
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Captains Courageous. There are others too, but more obscure, and a bunch of autobiographies too.
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I think we’re going to see a lot of shockwaves in the next few months as the Trump cuts really start to take hold.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the “gatekeeper” brands and organizations go away in short order, because USAID seemed to be a silent backer of so many of them. And so much money was being spent to keep their lights on, what happens when most of their bills aren’t getting paid?
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next.
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Meanwhile, looks like we might get a Schumer Shutdown (go viral, nickname, go viral!) and as Erickson points out, that means the new Director of OMB, a guy intimately involved in a thing called Project 2025, gets to run the government. Erickson’s take is, “Oh no, Brer Fox, don’t throw me in that briar patch!”
And Russia has rejected the cease-fire offer, so the ball is back in our court.
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A lot of folk on the left are still horrified by the name of Project 2025. It’s a straight path to theocracy or something.
Nevermind that it’s not actually a plan set out by the administration but by a think tank, it’s still quite a boogeyman…
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It’ll be like that Oprah show:
”YOU are nonessential! And YOU are nonessential!…”
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Schumer squinked. He will support the bill.
He was a bit unhappy that he got so badly outmaneuvered. Johnson recessed the House to preclude any negotiation of alternatives, so “take it or shutdown”.
Schumer took it, indeed. Kinda hard.
If we sent him a pillow, would he get the joke?
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I think crows are about to go endangered…..
blob:https://x.com/6bad6471-8c25-416d-99f6-45168e66c5a2
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https://x.com/6bad6471-8c25-416d-99f6-45168e66c5a2
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Page doesn’t exist.
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Yeah, apparently there’s something about Twitter links that’s different.
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Try it this way.
https://x.com/SDN1095948/status/1900561784047570951
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