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Amadan Enjoying my short-lived victory 14hr ago

I haven't stepped into a Barnes & Noble in years, but I understand that it's mostly walls of romantasy and Brandon Sanderson nowadays. But you know, it's a chicken-and-egg problem that has more to do with the ruthless pursuit of quarterly earnings than it does with some malicious cabal of white female NYC publishers refusing to greenlight anything a man will read. What genre has always outsold every other genre? Romance. Who buys the most books nowadays? Young women. Hence Twilight, 50 Shades, Sarah Maas, and so on.

I'm skeptical that there is some breakout male author who could bring in male readers the way these authors bring in female readers (the last truly cross-gender mass phenomenon was probably Harry Potter and even that was a majority female fanbase). I'm very skeptical that publishing would refuse to print it if they actually smelled that kind of money.

The fact is that the publishing industry has changed dramatically in a lot of ways since the golden age of SF. Not just in tilting more strongly towards female preferences, but tilting strongly towards "Only books that are bestsellers and will bump our QEs are worth supporting." (See this phenomenon also with movies, which have turned into a different kind of formulaic slop, but not exclusively targeted at women.) The death of the midlist is I assume common knowledge by now. It used to be that agents and publishers would cultivate a relationship with an author whom they expected to produce books over the course of a career, and if every book wasn't a best-seller, as long as each one paid out, it was good enough, because the cumulative earnings were enough to sustain the author (and his agent, and his publisher). Nowadays, not so much. Publishers don't want a long tail from middling sellers, they want bestsellers and are only willing to invest in a book that has a chance of becoming that, and they are only willing to invest so much in an author who doesn't break out.

Hence Brandon Sanderson (whose fanbase is large male) doing fine, and Stephen King and Haruki Murakami and a few others, but only if they are huge sellers with already established names. Meanwhile, while even the John Scalzis and Larry Correias are making a decent living, you will not usually find them occupying premium real estate in a bookstore.

I am not denying there is also a "publishing sneers at white males" problem, but it's not happening because publishing is unwilling to pick up money that's lying on the table.

Your links, are, unsurprisingly, also rather distorted views of reality.

The Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies affair was a reaction against leftism and SJWs in science fiction. Female-coded, to be sure, but their complaint at the time was not "Nobody is writing books men want to read" but "Nobody is writing books we want to read." Seriously half of it was Vox Day's abiding hatred for John Scalzi.

That /r/romance_for_men cartoon: well, I am not really a romance reader, but I've read a few (so I could at least say I had some understanding of the genre) and while I realize meme-cartoons aren't meant to accurately reflect reality with high fidelity, the Alpha Male Wolf Pack Mafia Boss Billionaire is basically a gross exaggeration of the most formulaic and traditional romance story ever, the one that has been the stock romance story for as long as there have been romance stories: women want to read about an impressive and desirable man falling in love with a woman who is plain and generic enough that any (female) reader can imagine herself in her place. It's no more complicated than that. No, that doesn't leave much for the male reader, but I will say that if you want cute love stories with actual functional couples, there seem to be quite a few that do not feature Chad Thundercock or BDSM.

Yeah, it's unfortunate that there isn't much real "romance for men" outside of indie publishing, but again, that's because men don't buy romance.

As for your beloved idol Dread Jim, I almost literally laughed out loud that he thinks John fucking Ringo is not right-wing enough. Apparently if you don't have women literally in chains... oh wait.

Well, there's always Tom Kratman.

As for this:

In “Lucifer’s Hammer”, written in 1978 by Niven and Pournelle, civilization collapses, there is famine, and people start eating people The cannibals are not especially black, even though realistically, it is likely that the cannibals would be disproportionately black. The only guy who suggest that there might be a correlation between cannibalism and blackness is the horribly prejudiced ignorant hick.

In Lucifer’s hammer the authors are careful to make the proportion of blacks among the cannibal army exactly and precisely the same proportion as blacks are a percentage of the US population, nonetheless today the book is deemed utterly outrageous and horribly reactionary for having any black cannibals whatsoever. Observe that in today’s collapse of civilization books, all cannibals are white.

It's been a while since I read Lucifer's Hammer, but he's really glossing over how much the theme of that book was "When civilization collapses, white people become farmers and engineers and rebuild, and black people turn into rampaging cannibals." Yeah, the cannibal army wasn't exclusively black (and ironically enough, it was led by a messianic white man...) but I am pretty sure it wasn't 13%. Basically the majority of blacks in southern California joined the cannibal army, and any white people who didn't want to get et joined them. I don't think Niven and Pournelle were intentionally being "racist" (they threw a few black characters in with the good guys as well) but like, I am Niven fan but yeah, he knew what he was writing. (Including the motorcycle gang who takes a girl scout troop as sex slaves, but fortunately a boy scout troop rescues them and now every boy scout has his very own girl scout clinging to his feet, Frazetta-style.) You're taking at face value rants from a guy who thinks a book is too leftist if there is even a hint of female agency.

So yeah, where we are now is indie publishing for anything outside the mainstream or a very few Sanderson- and King-level big names. And that's because publishing (at least the industry as it is today) is dying a slow death.

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Corvos 14hr ago · Edited 13hr ago

Zoomers seem incapable of enjoying a story in which a character has values different from theirs, and furthermore they are prone to assuming that the author is endorsing those values.

I have more general thoughts on your post that I may flesh out later. Responding to this specifically, I think the dirty secret of 2016-2023 is that most woke callouts and twitter mobs were directionally accurate. People are actually pretty good at making friend/enemy distinctions and picking up on hidden feelings. Obviously the actual content of many of the accusations were bollocks but I strongly suspect that most people who ended up having trouble with the woke (including me) were genuinely reluctant or fake converters to the cause and thus, by woke standards, enemies.

The same is true for authors' values. Seen from a purely political, non-artistic perspective, putting badthink in your books is transmitting it to your readers. Rooting for the Empire is a common issue. To quote Blake re: Milton's Paradise Lost: "[Milton] was of the Devil's party, and never knew it". Even putting this aside, you run into the problem that in a hostile society lots of authors do deliberately assign their real views to a villain, to give their grievances and fantasies an airing with plausible deniability. In pre-liberal times, it was common (I am told) to write long volumes of risque smut before the heroine abruptly realises her mistake and spends the final chapter as a fallen, repentant woman.

One might believe that the artistic merit / enjoyment engendered by a book massively outweighs its potential for spreading badthink with plausible deniability, or one might not. But I will put forward that these positions are both preference choices rather than one being correct and the other being a fallacy.

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2rafa 14hr ago

The kneecap thing was a hardcore Irish republican activist with a name that directly referenced the IRA telling (if insincerely) a large audience to kill their MP. He could be credibly accused of more than hate speech.

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plural 14hr ago

Roblox has posted two separate responses to the vigilante bannings and none of them come close to saying they're just as bad as the predator. Not even the PCGamer article you're linking to even intimates that. It makes sense that people breaking the terms of service should be banned regardless of what their intention was behind it and anyway if they let this go on, knowing about it, doesn't that open them up to liability in the same way that NBC was potentially going to be held liable for the guy who killed himself on To Catch a Predator before they settled?

I'm not sure about the ID thing, the reason, I've been led to believe, why it's hard for Roblox to police who is actually underage or not is because of COPPA where they can't legally ask for more information from a user that has identified as under 13 unless they get their parents permission. Also, the online Safety Act shutting down that hamster forum was because it has additional requirements not related to age like submitting some kind of safety report on their website and making sure there was no possibly illegal content on the site or be subject to a fine and they opted to shut down rather than risk having to possibly be subject to a fine (or deal with writing a report, maybe).

Recently, when I saw this first come up on reddit there was a comment that talked about how robust the child safety controls are for Roblox, now. You can filter content by maturity or by sensitive topics (political/culture war things), you can hide microtransactions, only allow certain players you designate to join their server and not allow them to join other servers, DMs are not possible to anyone under 13, you can limit their playtime, you can also go through and look at what your kid has been playing, who they've been playing with, their recent public and private chat history. This is just from making a Roblox account and linking it to your kids' account.

I'm not saying there's not a problem but the predators go to Roblox because it has their prey. So, naturally, it has a predator problem. But there's probably (potentially) going to also be a similar problem for any kid that goes on the internet without any supervision or guidance at all.

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FiveHourMarathon Wawa Nationalist 15hr ago

Yeah, I like bookstores and libraries. I want to hang out in bookstores and libraries. I don't want to download new books, I want to browse and buy them in person.

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hydroacetylene 15hr ago

I don't claim that my co-religionists are perfect- and it's worth noting our actual religious elders don't either, undue pressure on your children to have a religious vocation is explicitly a sin.

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netstack Texas is freedom land 15hr ago

Why not?

Authors include non-terminal values all the time. The most popular reason has to be giving the good guys something to punch. The second is probably verisimilitude. How do you know these elements are indispensable, terminal, rather than artistic decisions?

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anon_ 15hr ago

Sure. Some people get away with getting into a shootout with the police. But very few do, and the kind of people that think they will win in a shootout with the cops are the last people that you should encourage to do so.

The stories of people that successfully jump the border with their kids are like man bites dog.

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anon_ 15hr ago

Even responsible adults can panic! That doesn't mean they aren't generally sufficiently responsible to care for a child.

It doesn't mean that in the sense of being sufficient, but surely it's at least a few bits of information in that direction.

Again: only if it doesn't work out for you. Which it often won't! But there are literally times when your choice is "break the law now, and it will be bad, or don't break the law now, and it will be worse."

Well, if it often won't work out then, on the balance we ought to advise people against it.

The police are not invincible

Sure, but I still wouldn't advise anyone about to be caught with a few grams of drugs to escalate it into a shootout with the police. Sure, some fraction of people that do so get away with it (that is, agreeing the police are not invincible) but on the median

The odds are extremely bad
The kind of person at the time is going to severely misapply the odds
Unless you're already about to charged with murder, you're gonna make it much worse than just eating the drug charge

the courts are not infallible, the law is not incontestable

Of course not. But the fallible courts have fairly-reliable armed men that, if you decide to contest their possible-mistakes via physical force, will enforce them against you.

This isn't a normative statement.

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erwgv3g34 15hr ago · Edited 15hr 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.

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JarJarJedi 16hr ago

I watched it a long time ago when it came out. Pretty decent TV as I remember.

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whatihear 16hr ago

There are some cases where someone can violate a custody agreement in such a way that the courts have very little chance of reversing matters. In particular, people often get away with kidnapping their own children to a different country that either holds a different view of who ought to have custody or refuses to extradite as a general principle. In fact, this even happens between US states (I know of some cases where California has refused to uphold Texas custody agreements related to trans healthcare for the kids for example).

In that kind of circumstance, and if the ex is horrifically abusing the child, it may in fact be reasonable to pull the trigger on violating the order. Your argument is that people don’t get away with kidnapping, so they shouldn’t do it even in extreme outlier cases, but people do in fact get away with kidnapping pretty commonly when borders get in the way.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 16hr ago

I mostly watch Chinese period dramas, and frankly I like the “everyone is an asshole” thing, mostly because it’s not out of step with an actual medieval society. Read about War of the Roses, read about any medieval period. They acted that way because they were basically very polite warlords and understood that everything they did would either expose them as weak or show them strong.

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urquan Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing? 16hr ago · Edited 15hr ago

Once this is rejected, the position of preferring hot and exciting, even if short-term, partnerships to a long-term investment with a lukewarm partner at best, from which the women does not derive any pleasure - seems only obvious.

Well, some fraction of men also would make this choice, and many do. It’s just that fewer have the opportunity.

And really, it feels like the hypothetical is missing the middle ground: the options aren’t “temporary fleshlight” or “permanent sex slave.” That’s already an extreme catastrophization of the options, done presumably for dramatic effect, but also demonstrates a wildly unhealthy view of what relationships with men are like.

The thing that’s missing isn’t women’s desire to be a tradwife, or even traditional family roles. What’s missing from this minority of women is the idea that pair-bonding with men is even possible at all. Most women still love a man, even if they don’t love you or me, personally. The only thing to do with attention-seekers like the X poster is to laugh at their inanity.

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MaiqTheTrue Renrijra Krin 16hr ago

Probably not. Most modern fantasy authors have good imagination except that they never really deep dive into other cultures or time periods and I think it’s a huge blind spot. Someone living in 16th century France would find just about everything about the modern European mindset weird. We’d find them strange as well. And honestly im not even sure that people as recent as the Victorian Era might not walk around modern London and wondering why people there are acting so strangely.

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self_made_human Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet 16hr ago

My favorite dino franchise is the Primal animated series. It takes its core conceit, a caveman teaming up with a T-Rex on a rampage of revenge, and executed so well. Great animation too, same director as the Clone Wars.

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naraburns nihil supernum 16hr ago

EDIT to flush out:

It's "flesh out"--like filling out a figure that began only as bones (i.e. in outline).

Willfully violating a custody order will just get your ass thrown in jail and the custody order enforced and discredit further attempts to challenge it.

Sure, if you get caught in the wrong jurisdiction. But violating a custody order doesn't even have to be willful; often it is the result of a misunderstanding, or an emergency, or just panic. Even responsible adults can panic! That doesn't mean they aren't generally sufficiently responsible to care for a child.

This makes about as much sense as "if a police officer is violating your 4A rights, try to steal his pepper spray". I absolutely am not denying the predicate here: officers do sometimes step over the 4A, just that reacting in that way is straightforwardly counterproductive.

Again: only if it doesn't work out for you. Which it often won't! But there are literally times when your choice is "break the law now, and it will be bad, or don't break the law now, and it will be worse." In that case, it's not irrational or irresponsible to decide that "bad" beats "worse." That's the unfortunate nature of reality. The police are not invincible, the courts are not infallible, the law is not incontestable. I wouldn't, as an attorney, encourage a client to ever violate a custody order! But I can imagine, as a parent, circumstances that might demand it of me.

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sun_the_second could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server 16hr ago

If I had to count all the settings I know of which offer extremely easy alignment of mental and physical gender, yet enjoy the fandom of many trans people who create explicitly trans OCs in those settings... well, I'd probably run out of fingers on at least one hand.

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JarJarJedi 17hr ago

Minority? Maybe? Extreme? Don't think so. There are a lot of women who reject the concept of traditional family and gender roles, and it's not considered "extreme" at all, it's "feminist" and "empowering". I mean, a woman thinking like that would not be considered crazy and would not be socially shunned in any but the most narrow circles. Not everybody would agree with her, but in no way that would make her a social pariah.

Once this is rejected, the position of preferring hot and exciting, even if short-term, partnerships to a long-term investment with a lukewarm partner at best, from which the women does not derive any pleasure - seems only obvious. It's like if I asked you, do you want to get excellent tasty meal every day for free, or a pile of gooey tasteless slop for which you must work for hours, what would you choose? Eventually, an abundance of fancy food may lead to some health problems if you're not careful, but while you're young and healthy, is it even a choice really?

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sun_the_second could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server 17hr ago · Edited 16hr ago

Zoomers seem incapable of enjoying a story in which a character has values different from theirs, and furthermore they are prone to assuming that the author is endorsing those values. (This is a generalization and I hope I'm not right, but it's what I gather from most young book reviewers nowadays.)

I have seen the inane "you choose what to put into your story and therefore creating a story where X' controversial thing happens which is kinda like X controversial thing that happens in reality makes you literally Hitler" criticism more than enough for my lifetime.

E.g. "putting generically evil goblins/orcs/demons into your story mirrors xenophobia". Although I suppose this is less about having values different from theirs and more about assuming Xenophobia to be a Sin, rather than a reaction that's bad when it's based on the wrong assumptions and good when it's based on the correct assumptions.

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yofuckreddit 17hr ago

I had two playlists. One I've shared previously, which is roughly my "Best of: All Time" list truncated down to 100 tracks.

The other is a workout playlist that is not perfect but good for cycling:

Arist(s) Name Track Name

Party Favor; Lil Gnar Spirits Pt. 2
Taylor Swift; Snakehips Lavender Haze - Snakehips Remix
RÃªve Hypersexual
Knox; John Harvie Leg Day
Megan Thee Stallion; Latto Budget (feat. Latto)
Rage Against The Machine Sleep Now In the Fire
TOOL Undertow
Our Last Night Anti-Hero
Tom Morello; Bring Me The Horizon Let's Get The Party Started (feat. Bring Me The Horizon)
SZA Low
Kesha; Eagles Of Death Metal Let 'Em Talk (feat. Eagles of Death Metal)
Mabel Don't Call Me Up
Post Malone; Halsey; Future Die For Me (feat. Future & Halsey)
flor Every Night
Tyga; Offset Taste (feat. Offset)
Jack Harlow; jetsonmade I WANNA SEE SOME ASS (feat. jetsonmade)
TOOL The Pot
Post Malone Wow.
Drake; Future Diamonds Dancing
Run The Jewels; El-P; Killer Mike Call Ticketron
Clearside Cop Drama
DJ Khaled; Drake POPSTAR (feat. Drake)
Rise Against The Good Left Undone
Nine Inch Nails Discipline
Aries FOOL'S GOLD
Aries DEADMAN WUNDERLAND
Logic Fade Away
The All-American Rejects "Swing Swing"
Big Sean; Post Malone Wolves (feat. Post Malone)
Jack Harlow Dua Lipa
blackbear lil bit
Joyner Lucas; Logic Isis (feat. Logic)
Logic Keanu Reeves
Run The Jewels; El-P; Killer Mike Oh My Darling Don't Cry
Sleep Token Granite
Halsey; ILLENIUM Without Me - ILLENIUM Remix
Run The Jewels; El-P; Killer Mike; DJ Premier; Greg Nice ooh la la (feat. Greg Nice & DJ Premier)
BOYS LIKE GIRLS BLOOD AND SUGAR
Bishop Briggs; King Kavalier River - King Kavalier Remix
Run The Jewels; El-P; Killer Mike Legend Has It
Sleep Token Chokehold
Run The Jewels; El-P; Killer Mike DDFH
TOOL Cold And Ugly - Live
NF PAID MY DUES
Flume; Tove Lo Say It (feat. Tove Lo) [Illenium Remix]
Petey USA The Freedom to Fuck Off
Halsey Gasoline
J. Cole MIDDLE CHILD
TOOL Jerk-Off - Live
Kendrick Lamar HUMBLE.
Rise Against Prayer Of The Refugee
Â¥$; Kanye West; Ty Dolla $ign FUK SUMN
DOVERSTREET Thank You
GloRilla; Megan Thee Stallion; Cardi B Wanna Be (with Megan Thee Stallion & Cardi B) - Remix
Pusha T; Ab-Liva Suicide
City Girls; Cardi B Twerk (feat. Cardi B)
3OH!3; Katy Perry; Matt Squire STARSTRUKK (feat. Katy Perry)
Amyl and The Sniffers Chewing Gum
Zach Bryan Oak Island
Logic; Eminem Homicide (feat. Eminem)
J. Cole G.O.M.D
Pusha T Numbers On The Boards
PHONK WALKER KING OF THE ROAD
Logic Under Pressure
JAY-Z; Linkin Park Dirt Off Your Shoulder / Lying From You
Lil Wayne; Cory Gunz 6 Foot 7 Foot
Rage Against The Machine Calm Like a Bomb
Audioslave Cochise
Mos Def Mathematics
Pusha T; Tyler, The Creator Trouble on My Mind
Kendrick Lamar DNA.
TOOL Forty Six & 2
Eminem The Ringer
Vince Staples Norf Norf
Geto Boys Still
Pusha T; Chris Brown Sweet Serenade
Pusha T Come Back Baby
Drake Toosie Slide
FJ Law; Laur Elle play dumb
Kanye West Black Skinhead
Tinie Tempah; Zara Larsson Girls Like (feat. Zara Larsson)
Andy Mineo I Ain't Done
Yellow Claw DJ Turn It Up

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ThomasdelVasto Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου 17hr ago

Yeah, David Chapman writes a lot about how value has collapsed all into one set of 'good' versus 'bad' where it used to be a lot more distinctive. https://meaningness.com/systems-crisis-breakdown

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yofuckreddit 17hr ago

"Funny" Anecdote about SW - they have (had?) one of the most sociopathic and dysfunctional IT departments I've ever worked with. One of two clients my firm has ever fired.