erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
Fuck, is that why he stopped updating? I've been reading him for a decade!
F. He joins Lawrence Auster among the ranks of greats whose words continue to inspire from beyond the grave.
I've lived almost 50 years - less than some, more than some. I've been all over the world, and seen some incredible things. New Years' Eve in Times Square. Halloween in Salem. Sunrise over Mt. Fuji. Sunset at the Sultan's Palace in Istanbul. Midnight on the Las Vegas Strip. I've stood in a pack of buffalo in the South Dakota Badlands. I've touched the Sea Lions at Fisherman's Wharf. I've had a pint of bitter in Dublin, a glass of saké in the alleys of Shinjuku, and a sip of moonshine in the hills of Tennessee. I've flown First Class in the top deck of a 747, and solo in a Cessna 172 in the black of night over the Florida Keys. I've loved some wonderful people, and been loved by them. I've made my peace with God.
Let them come. I'm ready.
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
There was some great intersectionality between the alt right of the 2010s and Friendship is Magic. Apart from /mlpol/ and My Nationalist Pony, you also had things like The Dreaded Jim's "Rabid Puppies and My Little Pony" and AntiDem's "In Which I Determine Whether Friendship Really Is Magic" as well as his three part review of Friendship is Optimal. And I think "Just An Assistant" might have been a stealth neoreactionary story. All while Breitbart was reporting on Ted Cruz's favorite pony and wondering which little horse Trump could pick in response.
Good times.
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
Do people actually want to be told "I don't know"? My guess is that, much like managers prefer optimistic timelines that turn out to be wrong over accurate, pessimistic timelines, people would rather get a wrong answer than no answer, especially if they can't tell that the answer is wrong. Unless you give specific instructions to the contrary to the Indians doing RLHF and train them in the methods of rationality, you are going to get hallucinations.
Most people have no idea what actual war crimes are. They think any random fucked up thing that happens in a war is a war crime. Real war crimes are defined by the Hague and Geneva conventions. They are things like "fighting out of uniform" and "pretending to surrender" (e.g., Gabi's destruction of the armored train in Attack on Titan is definitely a war crime; she should have gotten hanged for that, along with her commander for authorizing it, but they won, so they just killed the witnesses and called it a day).
erwgv3g34
18hr ago
And don’t get me started about Nazifurs and the 4chan creation Aryanne the white supremacist My Little Pony.
Christian/Neoreactionary Sunset Shimmer was better.
erwgv3g34
20hr ago
This is what TVTropes calls the Fleeting Demographic Rule. It's not limited to comic books; you can find examples in any medium aimed at children.
I know embarrassingly little about the military, but don't officers typically start out as soldiers?
No. Officers and enlisted (both are soldiers) are two completely separate, parallel career tracks. Officers are the middle-class track; they require a college degree and usually start at 22. Enlisted are the working-class track, and usually start at 18. All officers outrank all enlisted (in theory, anyway; in practice, only a very stupid lieutenant would try to boss around a senior enlisted, who would quickly have a word with a higher-ranking officer to put the kid in his place). A small number of officers (referred to as mustangs) start out as enlisted, but that's rare.
Heinlein takes a shot at this system in Starship Troopers:
The Commandant continued: "That’s the Moment of Truth, gentlemen. Regrettably there is no method known to military science to tell a real officer from a glib imitation with pips on his shoulders, other than through ordeal by fire. Real ones come through — or die gallantly; imitations crack up.
"Sometimes, in cracking up, the misfits die. But the tragedy lies in the loss of others... good men, sergeants and corporals and privates, whose only lack is fatal bad fortune in finding themselves under the command of an incompetent.
"We try to avoid this. First is our unbreakable rule that every candidate must be a trained trooper, blooded under fire, a veteran of combat drops. No other army in history has stuck to this rule, although some came close. Most great military schools of the past — Saint Cyr, West Point, Sandhurst, Colorado Springs didn’t even pretend to follow it; they accepted civilian boys, trained them, commissioned them, sent them out with no battle experience to command men... and sometimes discovered too late that this smart young ‘officer’ was a fool, a poltroon, or a hysteric.
"At least we have no misfits of those sorts. We know you are good soldiers — brave and skilled, proved in battle else you would not be here. We know that your intelligence and education meet acceptable minimums. With this to start on, we eliminate as many as possible of the not-quite-competent — get them quickly back in ranks before we spoil good cap troopers by forcing them beyond their abilities. The course is very hard — because what will be expected of you later is still harder.
"In time we have a small group whose chances look fairly good. The major criterion left untested is one we cannot test here; that undefinable something which is the difference between a leader in battle... and one who merely has the earmarks but not the vocation. So we field-test for it
"Gentlemen! — you have reached that point. Are you ready to take the oath?"
But every military in the world uses a similar structure, so there must be something to recommend it.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
I always thought that was a punishment sphere.
C. S. Lewis doesn't count; that was back when everyone was Christian, or at least Jewish. Even Jerry Pournelle was towards the tail-end of that era. A science fiction author being Christian doesn't really become remarkable until after the New Atheism of the 2000's.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
Mormon cosmology might have something to do with it.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
She just has to avoid failing; she wins by default. It's completely different from a man, who can be nice, safe, reliable, and still end up completely overlooked.
There is a reason Fluttershy is the most popular of the mane six. Butterscotch would have ended up FA.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Big Fat Liar (2002). Surprisingly good for a kid's film; the "Hungry Like the Wolf" pool scene is very memorable, as is the "I Wish" warehouse montage, and, of course, the "Right Here, Right Now" helicopter ride. And, yes, very 2000's; right up there with Shrek (2001) and Digimon: The Movie (2000).
Your best bet is to go indie. If you absolutely must attempt traditional publishing, skip the agents and try submitting directly to Baen.
But, seriously, go indie.
Trad publishing would be hard enough if you were willing to play the idpol game, because you'd be competing with all the other people who are also willing to play the idpol game, and trad publishing is a tournament market where a few well-connected authors make it big and everyone else waits tables. But the fact that you are not willing to play makes it hopeless.
You are like a student applying to Harvard on the strength of his SAT and AP scores, unwilling to do extracurriculars or networking because that's not what education should be about, refusing to disclose his URM status and without a legacy family member to vouch for him; it's not going to work.
I see from the sibling comments that you don't want to publish serially. That's not ideal (you are leaving money on the table), but not quite a dealbreaker; while serial publishing on Royal Road or similar supported through Patreon is the usual way to fund a work in progress, once it is finished the standard practice is to delete the free copy and put it on Kindle Unlimited, so you can just jump straight to that.
And I also see that your goal is to make enough money to quit your job. As you correctly note, if an online novel gets popular enough it will eventually be acquired by a trad publisher anyway. If not, it is very unlikely that it would have ever gotten traditionally published in the first place, or that it would have paid back its advance if it had. None of those self-published guys you see at your local's writer groups would have made it big if they had tried trad publishing instead of online publishing; they would have just failed.
If you are serious about this, you have to commit one way or the other. Make a desperate all out effort to get traditionally published, including ticking the idpol boxes, and understand that you will most likely fail anyway. Or put all your effort into being an indie author, including adapting your writing to the serial format, and understand that you will most likely end up as a midlister doing his own marketing and outreach and never making as much money as you are currently making in a well-renumerated job.
And if neither of those are acceptable to you, just quit now, before you waste any more time on this.
And I see what you mean about them appealing to a "male romance fan" but- well, does it not strike you that there is a large overlap between the male protagonists of those stories and the generic, uninteresting, personality-less girl being mocked in that /r/romance_for_men cartoon?
Yes, of course. That's why we call them MC; because they are so interchangeable that we can't even remember their names. They are "boring, indecisive schlubs whose only identifiable personality traits are vague kindness and an inhuman ability to put up with abuse", as Nornagest put it. These stories are named after the love interest, not the protagonist, because she is the one who is actually unique and interesting.
I bailed because the male protagonist, Yuu, is so annoyingly... well, non-masculine. Unassertive, cringing, insecure, less smart, less confident, and less cool than his girlfriend... I kept wondering "What does she see in him?" But you have made me realize I was seeing it from the wrong angle, as a story appealing to women (who I guess in Japan find an unthreatening submissive softboi a turn-on?) But no, it's appealing to men
I thought that was obvious? There is nothing in Shikimori to appeal to a woman; it is very clearly a male fantasy. Women in Japan, like women everywhere, are attracted to tall, rich, dominant assholes, and if you read Japanese media that is aimed at women, that is exactly what you get.
But no, it's appealing to men- or more specifically, to boys who feel insecure and unmasculine and unable to compete in traditionally masculine ways, but want to imagine the cute, smart but devoted and affectionate girl will still fall in love with them.
...
And this is perhaps why "romance for men" doesn't appeal to me much. I am hardly a "manly man" who wants to go out and conquer kingdoms, but I guess I am a traditional enough man that I want to see men working, striving, struggling, and earning their rewards. A guy who offers no apparent distinction but has women falling on his dick anyway is not a fantasy for me, it's a mystery.
Don't you think that's a little harsh?
Yes, in the real world, Komi would have friendzoned Tadano as soon as she started making progress on communicating, then dated a popular fuckboy. Nagatoro would have become attracted to an artist who had already drawn lots of girls naked, like a Japanese version of Titanic, instead of becoming Senpai's muse and helping him achieve his full potential. "Women don't care about a mans struggles, they wait at the finish line and fuck the winners", as Richard Cooper said.
What anime romcons (and other romance for men) sell is precisely the impossible fantasy of a world where this doesn't happen. Is it wrong to want to escape the domaine de la lutte for thirty minutes at a time, if only in our imaginations?
Have you read Haruki Murakami?
Nope, sorry; never even heard of this dude.
Boys would have to overcome the stigma of reading "romance" and, let's be honest, a story like I have described, where an ordinary boy wins the love and affection of a hot girl out of his league, would be scorned and mocked across social media and booktock, and become loser-coded.
A good salesman can come up with a marketing strategy to overcome any stigma, like calling G.I. Joe dolls "action figures", or rebranding minivans as SUVs. As for getting trashed on social media, well, yes, any story that appeals to men is going to have to make its peace with that, as is any man who wants to read something that he enjoys.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
I think the Freedom Alliance Elites are a closer parallel. From To the Stars by Hieronym, Chapter 34:
Defeats on the battlefield failed to put the remains of the Freedom Alliance in the mood for surrender, however. The hyperclass oligarchs, by now thoroughly indoctrinated by their own poisonous ideology, placed the blame for failure squarely on the shoulders of their soldiers, declaring that if their soldiers could or would not perform, then they would be modified until they would. In underground laboratories around the world, scientists tinkered with the genomes of vast arrays of clones, designing thicker cranial plating, muscular augments, toxin glands, and whatever else might be expected to improve combat performance, regardless of personal welfare or the source of the genetic modifications.
Perhaps the most disturbing modifications were those made to the brain, the seat of consciousness itself. Some brain regions were enlarged; others were shrunk or deleted entirely, written off as unnecessary in an instrument of war. Empathy, love, fear—all these were unnecessarily evolutionary adaptations that could now be placed squarely in the dustbin of history. The tools of war, these "perfect" soldiers would not need to ever question their orders, or indeed do anything but show their prowess in combat.
This horrific disregard for basic human dignity showed itself amply in the names of the abominations that would serve as the FA's elite soldiers in last stages of the war. Grunts, Tankers—these were not nicknames given by their enemy, but their actual designation, followed of course by a serial number. These soldiers came in different varieties, each shaped by their battlefield role—giant hulks for assault troopers, lithe, giant‐eyed nymphs for snipers. The Tankers were some of the worst, barely more than an out‐sized head on a shrunken body, perfect for connecting directly to the life‐support system of a medium armored vehicle.
While some of these creations were sentient, after a fashion, the nature of such a sentience was loathsome—tied to one task until death, devoid of human or even animal emotions, and each bound irreversibly by its cortical control module to its masters. It is telling that, at the end of the war, there was essentially no resistance to the Emergency Defense Council's Decree 224, ordering the summary execution of any FA "Elites" found anywhere.
In the end, the FA spared not even its civilian functions from such "enhancement"…
— Excerpt, Unification Wars, textbook for Primary School History
There are tons of anime romcoms aimed at men where the relationship between MC and FMC is the primary draw, rather than being a subplot of another genre. In fact, most of them take place in the standard high school setting and have no speculative elements. Toradora!, Komi Can't Communicate, Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro, Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!, Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie, Tomo-chan Is a Girl!, My Dress-Up Darling, Teasing Master Takagi-san...
I am specially fond of Nagatoro; my heart melted when I read chapter 114. I was so proud of Senpai for
I don't see why you couldn't write romance books aimed at men that were similar. Indeed, some of these titles started out as light novels, and to the extent that the novels on /r/romance_for_men successfully appeal to their target demographic, that seems to be exactly what they are doing.
erwgv3g34
13d ago
It has happened to western authors, too. Andy Weir and E. L. James both started out writing web fiction (literally fanfiction in the latter's case) before getting acquired by a mainstream publisher and making it big. But that was 14 years ago.
I see ranting all over the Internet that "No one is writing books (men) want to read" when there is in fact an entire ecosystem of indie-published authors doing just that.
The indie part is key. The complaint is not that nobody is writing books for men; the complain is that none of the mainstream publishers are publishing books for men, nor are any of the established awards recognizing them. Hence Sad/Rabid Puppies and "I just hope you like Amazon Exclusives".
And, of course, this has broader consequences. Bookstores can't stock copies of web novels. Since weeding manuals explicitly call for the removal of old books, libraries are increasingly populated by texts no man wants to read.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
From "The Next Ten Billion Years" by John Michael Greer (The Archdruid Report):
One hundred million years from now:
Retro-rockets fire and fall silent as the ungainly craft settles down on the surface of the Moon. After feverish final checks, the hatch is opened, and two figures descend onto the lunar surface. They are bipeds, but not even remotely human; instead, they belong to Earth’s third intelligent species. They are distantly descended from the crows of our time, though they look no more like crows than you look like the tree shrews of the middle Cretaceous. Since you have a larynx rather than a syrinx, you can’t even begin to pronounce what they call themselves, so we’ll call them corvins.
Earth’s second intelligent species, whom we’ll call cyons after their raccoon ancestors, are long gone. They lasted a little more than eight million years before the changes of an unstable planet sent them down the long road to extinction; they never got that deeply into technology, though their political institutions made the most sophisticated human equivalents look embarrassingly crude. The corvins are another matter. Some twist of inherited psychology left them with a passion for heights and upward movement; they worked out the basic principles of the hot air balloon before they got around to inventing the wheel, and balloons, gliders, and corvin-carrying kites play much the same roles in their earliest epic literature that horses and chariots play in ours.
As corvin societies evolved more complex technologies, eyes gazed upwards from soaring tower-cities at the moon, the perch of perches set high above the world. All that was needed to make those dreams a reality was petroleum, and a hundred million years is more than enough time for the Earth to restock her petroleum reserves—especially if that period starts off with an oceanic anoxic event that stashes gigatons of carbon in marine sediments. Thus it was inevitable that, sooner or later, the strongest of the great corvin kith-assemblies would devote its talents and wealth to the task of reaching the moon.
The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.
A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon.
Even so, it will be suggested long afterwards that the stark warning embodied in those long-abandoned spacecraft played an important role in convincing corvin societies to rein in the extravagant use of petroleum and other nonrenewable resources, though it also inspired hugely expensive and ultimately futile attempts to achieve interstellar migration—for some reason the corbins never got into the quest for fusion power or artificial intelligence. One way or another, though, the corvins turned out to be the most enduring of Earth’s intelligent species, and more than 28 million years passed before their day finally ended.
Most of these don't seem specific to LitRPGs?
1 is just a low verbal IQ thing, which pops up in web fiction because it is not filtered and edited the way commercial fiction is; you are reading straight from the slush pile.
2 is something you regularly see in all fiction, including mainstream blockbusters and prime time dramas; if you want something that depicts intelligent and competent characters instead of taking cheap writing shortcuts, you need to specifically filter for rational fiction or similar (e.g. hard science fiction).
3 is a blue tribe shibboleth, which you also see all the time in commercial fiction. If anything, web fiction is more likely to depict genuine respect for religion, because it is less gatekept.
4 and 5 is just projecting modern values into past settings, which, again, happens all the fucking time in commercial fiction. As Eliezer Yudkowsky put it:
Movies that were made in say the 40s or 50s, seem much more alien—to me—than modern movies allegedly set hundreds of years in the future, or in different universes. Watch a movie from 1950 and you may see a man slapping a woman. Doesn’t happen a lot in Lord of the Rings, does it?
Again, this is a widespread practice that has been going on for a very long time. Officers in the British army used to literally buy their commissions. Officers in the Roman army (above the rank of centurion, which were basically the equivalent of modern noncommissioned officers) were political appointees and political office holders.
There has never been an army where the officer class has been made up of promoted grunts; they always come from a higher social class than the men and start their careers as officers. And armies are the most ruthlessly selected of all human institutions; any that fail to perform are literally killed off by their rivals. That makes the officer-enlisted dichotomy one hell of a Chesterton's fence; I don't know why it works, but it does.
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