Narrator, audiobook producer, podcaster, writer, editor/producer for the JimFear138 YouTube Account, editor/co-producer for Laughably Dapper, and Project lead for Dramatically Dapper, co-founder of Dimension Bucket Magazine, and host of the Dimension Bucket Magazine Podcast. This site is meant to be a collection of my work so everything is nice and accessible.
Disclaimer: Opinions here do not represent the opinions of Laughably Dapper or Dimension Bucket Magazine. They are purely my own.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast! This time I get parody artist and student of philosophy Rucka Rucka Ali on to discuss Ayn Rand, her books, Objectivism, moral and ethical philosophy, human rights, his music, The German Question™, and plenty of other topics. The podcast went on for about 5 hours or so, and there was an issue with the audio from his side, again. I swear it sounded fine in my earphones, but then when I got it into playback his audio was clipping pretty bad. I've done what I can to clean it up, and he's at least understandable, if not coming through with perfect sound quality like we'd all want. I blame skype, because we fiddled with the audio beforehand to make it sound good. Next time I'll be sure to do a test recording beforehand to make sure the audio is all good. So apologies for not thinking of that this time. Personally I don't think it's too bad after processing, but I'll let you guys be the judge. Hope y'all enjoy, and thanks again to Rucka for coming on the show! MP3 Download of this episode: https://ia800408.us.archive.org/25/items/jimfear_audio_productions/Ep92.mp3 Rucka's Links: Website: http://ruckasworld.com/contact/ Main YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/itsRucka Rucka Reacts YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/RuckasBlack Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamrucka Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iamRucka/ iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/rucka-rucka-ali/id288447860
Fam, when it rains, it pours, I gotta tell ya. I swear I didn't plan it like this, to be publishing stories on my own in serials on steemit, and to have Cirsova #8 come out this week, and then further to have the Planetary: Earth anthology come out, but here we are and hopefully the avalanche won't be stopping any time soon! But yes! The Planetary: Earth anthology from Superversive Press is available today in kindle and paperback! From the Amazon page:
18 tales of explorers, lost worlds, strange and wondrous creatures, gods & goddesses of old, miraculous inventions, aliens, bots and post humans, brought together in this anthology of discovery and daring. Come explore the legends and chronicles of planet Earth and the space beyond in the fourth volume in the Planetary series.
My story for this one is a good ol' lost world style story, with explorers, dinosaurs, guns, high speed chases, danger, alien creatures, and some old fashioned two-fisted action! But if that don't whet your whistle then maybe one of the other 18 stories will! Here's the link! Go nuts! And be sure to leave a review after you finish and let us know what you think! Or drop me a line on twitter, gab, minds, tumblr, or here on the blog if you just wanna let me know what you thought of my story! I'd also like to thank Jon Del Arroz for giving it a beta-read for me and letting me know what he thought. Y'all should go check out his website, and buy one of his books while you're there on Amazon like For Steam & Country, The Gravity of the Game, or The Stars Entwined! I know it'd make his day and mine!
Do you love comic books? Are you ready to be depressed as shit? Well have I got the cure for your happiness! Just watch this video by Diversity&Comics, and you'll feel so down in the dumps you'll be looking for the gun to just end it all now!
Seriously, though, go watch the video. This is something you need to see, whether you like comic books or not. Because this is illustrative of what happens when social justice invades a medium. Look at those numbers D&C brings up there. Take a real good fucking look. Burn that shit into your god damned brain. Because this is what's going, not might, not maybe, it's a fucking certainty, going to happen to any industry sjw's invade.
Comic books are, like the video says, dead. They're dead. The indie market in comics is the only thing that matters, and the market share for that is so small it will never become the industry it once was. Something as enduring and American as comic books, and they killed it. This medium has been around since before World War II, and now, thanks to the machinations of shitty writers who care more about their political agenda than the thing they're creating, it's dead. Those sales numbers are fucking garbage, fam. Hot, nasty garbage. I want to be very clear about this, Marvel, DC, and companies like them have murdered an industry through peddling shitty comics with bad characters, bad character designs, horrible artwork, inane plots, diversity over story, and god only knows how many other failings. Enjoy your local comic book store while you can, because these companies have put every single one in America that can't supplant their flagging Big 2-4 sales with indie sales on a fast track to the slaughterhouse. Unless lots of people are showing up and spending money monthly, they're going to soon go extinct. I have no doubt that digital distribution will be fine, and there'll be a thriving used market for years, but mainstream hot-off-the-presses comic books that you buy in a shop are fucking dead. So let's use this as a springboard to talk about something constructive, because that's very depressing (especially to people like me who love the comic medium despite the high cost-entertainment ratio). I want to talk about the tactics of these people, how to recognize them, and how to stop them. Comic books are the canary in the coalmine, and we're all in the coalmine in some form or another. For novels and fiction, these people have managed to turn the market to their purposes because readers are very stubborn. They put a lot of time and money into big books, and they're not as willing to just stop reading if the material takes a nosedive in quality. Although in the past couple of decades that has been happening. But there's a serious buyer's justification when it comes to the book market that you don't have with comics. Books cost more, they take more time to read, and avid readers are nearly rabid for more. The market is not fragile, and they haven't been able to destroy it despite working since the 30's. Video games is another inherently anti-fragile market. With indie teams cropping up all the time putting out mostly quality games, people doing it for free, and sites like Steam and GOG out there to facilitate distribution, you can try to destroy games, but since anyone can come along and make a game, the only real gatekeepers are the console companies, who can not allow your game on their console. In which case you can just release the PC version and still do okay if you market it properly. Not only this, but gamers are comprised of a contingent of people that defeat agendas for fun every day. Something like Gamergate, to date the only successful repulsion of SJW tactics, was a godsend to these people because they were able to apply the lessons they'd learned in vidya to an actual, tangible, real life evil that needed to be defeated. So this market is pretty antifragile, and the SJW's haven't been able to destroy it yet, although not for lack of trying. That I can promise you. Go read a game journalism website if you don't believe me. So how did they destroy comic books? That's easy to answer. Just look at the ranks of the comic book creators. Artists, writers, all of them. Their ranks are filled to the brim with SJW's. These people, despite being terrible artists and writers, despite actively driving fans away with their shitty comics, have somehow been put into the position where not only do they control an outlet of creation for this thing that millions of people love, they control the most popular outlets of creation for this thing that millions of people love.
This is important. Even as the gatekeepers in publishing they haven't been able to kill the fiction industry, because it's been a fairly gradual decline over the decades. A slow boiling of the frog, if you will. In video games literally anyone can make one. If I wanted to I could learn the requisite skills and take three or four years and design a video game, publish it on Steam or my own website, and there you go. Instant workaround. But with comics, Marvel, DC, and companies like them are the big fish. There is almost nowhere else to go to get your comics other than indie publishers which may or may not be featured in local comic stores. Because they've been able to install themselves as the almost sole important creators, they've been able to destroy comic books faster than any other industry they've invaded.
I don't know if you know this, but comic books take an astounding amount of money to produce. Especially serials and ongoing stories. You have to have a writer(s), artist(s), inker(s), colorist(s), and on. Then you have to mass-produce it and distribute it via a company like Diamond. So if you get a spot at one of the biggest companies out there (and there are only 4 or so really big ones), you gain control of the choke point defined by the prohibitive cost. This is how the destruction of comics was able to be achieved so quickly. So how do we stop them? Well, with comics, that's dead. Find manga or indie comics that aren't shit. Support crowdfunded efforts at making comics fun again like Alt-Hero and Patriotika. The industry as a major cultural force might be dead, but the indies will always be there. Support up and coming companies like Alterna, or reasonably big companies with some cool titles like Valiant (although as an aside with Valiant, support good comics like X-0 Manowar and Bloodshot, and kill diversity comics like Faith dead by simply not buying it. The worms haven't dug so deep at Valiant that they're beyond help, but they'll need to have that lesson beaten into them with sales figures). But so far as other mediums go, there is hope, and to find this hope I turn to the wisdom of O'Sullivan's Law, which states that any enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. Now, before you get upset at my partisan bullshit, let me explain. I am not saying that you have to be expressly right wing to keep the SJW's out of your industry. Because god knows with the amount of shit actual liberals get from these creeps they're a danger to everybody, not just the political right. But the simple fact is that if you are not an SJW enterprise, SJW's will attempt to take it over, usually with some success.
Valiant Comics is a perfect example of this. Valiant is not expressly right or left wing, and obvious right winger and friend of mine Jon Del Arroz has spoken favorably about their new X-0 Manowar series. But they also run Faith, which is an SJW comic, no mistake. They're not beyond help, but they need to cut the cancer out before it invades the brain. So you don't have to be completely right wing, you just need to recognize this behavior and get rid of any individuals it manifests itself in. Now, you might call this a McCarthyist communist hunt, and you're only partially wrong. People like to forget that McCarthy actually did catch Communist agents in his hunts, and he might've, just maybe, actually done some good. Maybe. But McCarthy aside, this doesn't require a confrontation on the level of, "ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY?!?!" All this requires is application of an heuristic. An heuristic is a method of problem solving that, while not perfect, is sufficient for the goals one might be striving towards. So if we have a profile of SJW mentality and methods, which we do, we can apply that as an heuristic and immediately ax people who show symptoms of that behavior and aren't amenable to correction. That last part is important. "...Aren't amenable to correction."
I'm going to be frank with you. We have proof now. The comic sales numbers do not lie. Take a walk through Diversity&Comics' channel if you need any more convincing. It's a bleak stroll, my dudes. We not only know, we can definitively prove that SJW's destroy industries. That isn't a side effect, that isn't some random happenstance that just happened to hit comics fairly hard, it's the actual, expressed goal.
It's what they want to do. If they didn't, they'd amend their stories and try to assuage flagging sales by appealing to their audience instead of their political agenda. But numbers have no effects on ideologues, the only thing that matters to these people is their ideology. So, what I'm advocating, in plain terms, is that if someone begins to show the traits of the writers and artists at Marvel, the game journalists, or the people at fiction outlets like Escape Artists or Uncanny Magazine, you talk to them. You bring them into a business meeting, and let them know that this shit is poison, and if they don't stop, they will be let go. If they let it go, then fine. If they don't, fire them immediately. This is a definable and describable pattern of behavior. At this point we have no excuse other than laziness for not addressing it. We have the proof at this point. SJW values and tactics are incredibly bad for business. Stop putting up with them.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast! This is another ramblecast, in which I talk about some wild (to me) shit that happened, talk more about D&D, and then degenerate into an incoherent ramble on economics for like 45 minutes. Hopefully next week I'll be able to get Alexander from Cirsova on and we'll talk shit about The Elder Scrolls and shit.
