So, recently I went through a couple of games (callout to Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn), and after growing bored with those games (or finishing them outright), I found myself looking for something new to play and that’s how I found about Coinlooting.com. As I went through my Steam games, I remembered DC Universe Online was one of those that has been in my folder forever, and I started thinking about looking at it again.
You see, years ago, I fired up that game and played to about level 13 or 14, but kind of gave up there because it was one of those games that had a lot to do up until about that level, and then it basically threw you into the larger world, and all I remembered was being slaughtered practically everywhere I went. There never seemed to be a sense of “go over here and there are mobs and missions of your level” aspect to the game, and everywhere I went was just instant death. So I quit.
This time, I looked at the game and decided I would give it yet another try, and if I ran into the same problem again, at least I would have a few days of putting around before giving up once more.
Now, I’ve been playing the game about a month, and let’s just say that I’m really enjoying it. I’ve maxed out (in level to 30) one character and am about to complete two others in the very near future. But what I’ve discovered is that even though level 30 is the highest level, the end game becomes much about leveling gear than just the character’s level. In order to run higher content, you need higher level gear averages, and then you can compete for even higher gear to continue that type of progression.
But there are a lot of things you can do as you get up there in level and gear. And there’s much more than just simple gear acquisition. There is also base building (their version of personal housing), various types of implants and even ally progression (you get an ally that can jump into combat with you for tiny fractions of time that you can level up to get stronger and more useful).
But what really make the game shine is its coordination with the DC Universe itself. Throughout the game, you interact with the heroes and villains of DC so that you start to feel somewhat like a part of that universe rather than someone living in an amusement park that runs into a glorified version of Mickey Mouse or whomever. Every character chooses from a series of heroes or villains that match the power class you chose when starting your character, so quite often you’re communicating with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Joker, Circe or Lex Luthor. And then you end up interacting with a collection of the rest of the DC Universe as you progress through stories and missions.
Just recently, I discovered the Broker (which is the game’s version of an auction house), and I’m quickly learning the aspects of that part of the universe, having gone from having about $10,000 or so in game money to building a Bruce Wayne-ish level of wealth at about $170 million. Strangely enough, the Broker feels like a game all on its own, and it can be quite addicting.
The one tiny criticism I have with the game so far is that in order to really take advantage of much of what the game has to offer requires you to subscribe and pay their monthly (or in larger increments for more time) fee. I subbed for a year so I don’t have to worry about that, but I can easily see how the game might get really frustrating for anyone who plays it with the hopes of maintaining a free account. But that’s really a squabble for another time because I’m subbed, so I’m having a great time, and honestly, the game developers have to make some money or the game’s just not going to be maintained going forward. So there is that.
But one thing I really enjoy about the game is being a superhero (or supervillain). It was the one aspect of City of Heroes that I truly miss, and one of the problems of superhero games is that there aren’t a whole lot of them left out there, and of the ones that are left, they’re generally not that good. I mean, there’s a Marvel one out there, but I’ve played variations of that, and it is very transaction needy, and it doesn’t really feel like it has much of a story continuity that would keep one returning. Unfortunately, City of Heroes was canceled back in its hey day by a company that just didn’t have a lot of faith in its franchise (although there may have been some intellectual property issues as many players adopted the names or characteristics of well known franchise heroes, and I suspect there were lawsuits in the works because of that). There has been one very recent attempt to recapture the ideals of City of Heroes in a game called Ship of Heroes, but I played during an early beta (or later alpha), and it felt very rudimentary and in need of a lot of growth before it would be a fraction of what was once great about City of Heroes.
For now, DC Universe seems to be able to fill the superhero need, and the developers appear to be interested in maintaining content going forward, so as long as they continue with that trajectory, I suspect the game might be well worth continuing to play.
As a political scientist currently working in the State of Texas, one of the things that often bothers me is whenever the national media tries to create a narrative that a red state is potentially turning purple (i.e., previously conservative state starts trending towards becoming more liberal). Whenever I read (or hear or watch) such proclamations, my immediate thought is that I’m receiving wishful thinking much more than actual news content. But every election cycle, these claims happen, and as often happens immediately after the election, rarely do those predictions come true.
This was my thought when there was so much effort put into claiming that Texas was going to be turning blue during the last election (and slightly before it). In recent memory, there were claims that Beta O’Rourke was going to overcome Ted Cruz for US senator, which never happened. And then there was a weird belief that President Trump was going to lose to Joe Biden in the state vote, and now I’m hearing claims that due to “popularity” Beta O’Rourke has a strong chance of becoming governor against Greg Abbott when he runs for reelection. Again, wishful thinking along with further beliefs that the state is on the verge of becoming that ever so elusive “purple” state.
Probably not going to happen.
But it could. If only progressives actually did something about making those predictions come true, something they NEVER do no matter how much blustering they do.
Now, before you get all “Duane, stop with your crappy conservative man-child crying,” I should probably point out that I’m not saying these things because I want red states to remain red, but because I’d be quite happy if they did turn blue, or at least purple. I just realize they’re probably not going to, and the reason is the rationality for why these areas always stay the same.
So, your argument right now is probably, “okay, smarty pants, tell us how progressives can actually win in these areas if you think you know better.”
And therefore, I will.
First, progressives need to understand the canvas on which they are trying to paint this bizarre approach to “winning” future elections. And they need to understand why their predictions rarely come true. And then, second, once they understand those reasons, they need to work as a network to make sure that they actually do something to change their direction, because continuing to pull from the same playbook is never going to achieve long-lasting results that work in their favor. So, here goes:
Stop treating conservative behavior as inherently wrong. Instead, try to understand conservative ideals and see how they can start to fit into a progressive agenda.
Being a progressive means being a person who advocates for change. But in order to convince people to want to change something, you have to do more than just point at something you don’t like and say that’s wrong. You need to have actual solutions. Example: One of the hot issues in Texas is guns. Saying that people have guns is bad isn’t going to change the mind of a person who grows up believing that guns are a part of the national fabric and that it may have served as a necessary evil in the building of this nation. Pointing out that guns are used to kill people might seem like a logical ploy to persuade, but all it does is point out a simple fact that doesn’t lead to alternative outcomes.
Think about it this way: If I give up my guns in order to achieve some elusive sense of safety so I don’t accidentally kill myself, I’m still stuck with the struggle of logic once I realize that bad people use guns to hurt other people, and thus, being without a gun means always being perceived as a victim to actual armed people. It doesn’t even matter if I’m already a progressive; I still exist in this society where guns already exist, and unfortunately, there are people who tend to use those guns to do bad things to other people. It feels inevitable that one is going to need guns in order to simply survive. Or we take another page from the conservative playbook and realize that we can cut down on guns eventually, as long as we bolster up the police forces that work around us to protect us from those evil people who want to do us harm.
But honestly, why do we even think that there are people out there who want to do us harm? How many of us have actually seen those “people” face-to-face on a daily basis? I’d say not many of us.
Most people will understand the threat of violence due to a situation or two they may have encountered in their lifetime, usually when they have gone into a bad neighborhood or just made a stupid decision that didn’t turn out as good as they hoped it would end up. Maybe your house or car was broken into.
But let’s look at that last possibility (mainly because it’s the most likely one to occur to someone rather than random violence). How would having a gun have made a burglary or a car vandalism (that led to property loss) have turned out better? I’d argue that in most of those cases, a gun wouldn’t have made a single difference because most of those incidents happen out of your sight.
Yet, in one’s mind, he or she is going to perceive that incident as “violent”. And if anything, you should be asking yourself how that conclusion was reached, because in the end if you’re arguing for gun rights as a way to counter such horrible circumstances, logic would tell you that a gun wouldn’t have made a difference whatsoever. Yet, it’s often tied to issues like this one, and is on one’s mind when making future decisions about such policy issues.
So that begs the question: Where did we get such ideas that petty crimes are somehow tied to the senseless violence we perceive exists all around us?
Well, where do we actually experience this type of violence that so much of us believe is prevalent? Well, this might surprise you, but if you think about it, the majority of us encounter this type of violence in the media we consume as a natural part of our lives. If you watch television on a regular basis, you’re inundated with more violence than you can possibly imagine. Just yesterday, I received the line-up of new shows on one network alone (CBS), and I was overwhelmed by how many of their television shows airing right now are all about police and crime (NCIS, NCIS: Hawaii, FBI, FBI: Most Wanted, FBI: International, S.W.A.T., Magnum, P.I., Blue Bloods, CSI: Vegas, Bull, the Equalizer, and NCIS: Los Angeles). That’s just one network.
Now add all the other networks with the violent shows they air, and the add in all of the 24 hour news that constantly tells us how much in danger we are from practically everything that exists around us (from school shootings to crazy people on the national highways), and you start to see a sense of why people go to bed and then wake up in the mornings convinced that violence is going to be coming at them from every direction. Keep in mind that a lot of this programming we consume comes from historically liberal sources (meaning mostly fed to people who would tend to be progressives). That doesn’t even get into the mass hysteria that is fed daily on right-wing media channels that take that sense of fear and turns it up to 11.
And then go into those areas saying that “we need to control guns”, and you have an immediate response of hatred for practically everything else that you have to say after that.
And that’s just one issue. Now imagine you have five issues of progressive importance that you want to feed to a red state. Let’s just choose 5 random ones that tend to get trotted out a lot: guns, abortion, health care, national defense and education in schools. Keep in mind, there are hundreds to thousands of other issues that could be important to any one individual, yet for the sake of simplicity, I’m keeping it down to just these five to show how difficult it is to maintain a party message that can sway an audience that doesn’t already agree with you.
We talked a little bit about guns already, but let’s just touch on the others for a moment.
Abortion: Remember, you’re appealing to the average person in a red state. Most often, the arguments used to “sway” people on this issue are along the lines of “my body, my choice,” which if seen on a surface level can be perceived to be specifically a gender based issue that would only be important to a woman who might be seeking a potential abortion. Yet, the people who seem to be boisterous about this are both men and women, and they’re often split right down the middle of the issue itself. Conservatives tend to gravitate towards arguments that point out connections to religious doctrine, even if that religion doesn’t have actual policy or doctrine on that specific issue. Many people are willing to just turn off thinking any further about an issue if they suspect that a religion they follow might side one way or another on this particular issue (quite often selective, depending upon parish and specific leadership of any particular church). Rational people can make some pretty irrational decisions based on erroneous beliefs, yet they’ll cling to deal life to those beliefs, regardless of how much persuasion is attempted to reverse those decisions.
Health Care: Most people who have health care don’t even know what their health care covers. Due to insurance secrecy, they quite often don’t even know how much they’re paying for the prescriptions (and usually don’t find out until their insurance doesn’t cover it). Some people with crappy coverage think they have Cadillac coverage, and some people, like members of Congress, have the greatest coverage of all and somewhat suspect that everyone should be happy with the coverage they have, even though their constituents have little to no coverage.
National Defense: Most people don’t know how much of the national budget is spent on defense, and even those that do tend to not have a clue how much corruption is built into the system to reward major defense industry corporations that provide munitions and logistics. And when we find out, we tend to just file it away under “stupid things the government does” because we have little to no say so on how spending is decided. Years back, there was a national outrage about how much the government was spending just to buy hammers for the military, and then almost immediately after, the outcry stopped. Did we fix the problem? No. We just stopped paying attention to it. That alone defines our approach to dealing with national defense.
Education in Schools: There is so much baggage wrapped up in education that it’s almost hard to determine what to do about the transgressions that occur here. Much of the debate from conservative channels on education is that it is used to indoctrinate younger people to liberal values, yet much of the debate against conservatives is that they are trying to use education to indoctrinate people to ignore much of history, like slavery, the honoring of confederate leaders, and even the presentation of confederate symbology. Progressives tend to boil it down to simpler terms, as all three of those issues are generally wrapped around in the ideology of promoting racism, and thus much of the problem tends to be addressed in attempts to shame conservatives into compliance. And to their chagrin, it rarely stings as much as they hope it will. More on that to follow.
Which brings us to the real problem that progressives have when trying to change the minds of red state ideology. With the Internet came a new process for dealing with dissent, in which our old procedures were to participate in public forums where both sides could present their side and then let the public decide. The Internet destroyed the gatekeeper model, in which the media was often the go between for the two sides, and now because distance is no longer an issue, the Internet allows like minded people to converse with each other and completely ignore any opposing viewpoint. Rather than direct confrontation, the subsequent result has been either shaming or cancellation. Shame was the previous model, in which addressing such divisions in the open would result in change of procedure or policy. Think of it as the Karen Effect, in which the original approach to dealing with people who were caught on film doing bad things was to shame them, exposing their behavior, which would push them to try to do better in the future. Now, take that Effect a bit further, and no longer do we just try to push such behavior in the open to use shame as a change agent, but now we tend to use that same vehicle to locate the original offender and then hunt them down until we can expose them to their employers and get them fired if they ever do something out of line. In other words, we stopped shaming for the sake of changing their behavior but are now shaming them to bring about their complete destruction.
This is a major reason why shame isn’t working with red state behavior. If a governor does something that is perceived as horrific, like Governor Abbott of Texas did when he claimed eliminating abortion wouldn’t be an issue, especially with women who were raped because Texas would somehow magically eliminate all rape, well, the first part of shaming was utilized when pointing out that Texas doesn’t even process a fraction of the rape kits it gathers. But because shaming doesn’t work any more as a change agent, the attempt is to use that same shaming process to build about an eventual removal from office (as they’re arguing that it may assist Beta O’Rourke in his future campaign to become the next governor).
So, what solutions do we have that might actually cause progressives to do better in red states? Well, for one, progressives need to actually address issues that can make situations better for all. Every issue has multiple potential responses that could serve to solve those problems in ways that don’t necessarily attack the right as the “cause” of the problem. Like I mentioned with gun violence, attacking gun owners as bad people doesn’t cause people to buy into the argument; it alienates people. Whereas, attacking the element of fear itself, more of a Rooseveltian approach, might actually lead people to think that the need for a gun isn’t as prevalent as it used to be. Sure, there would still be people who would want guns (something that shouldn’t have ever been a problem), but it would no longer be perceived as something necessary just to survive on a day to day basis.
Think about countries like Great Britain. They don’t have the gun violence that we have, even to the point that their police don’t often feel the need to carry guns (unless they perceive a situation that would warrant it). But look at their police procedurals they air on their networks. Quite often, the detective detects, rather than participates in mass shootouts that make Quentin Tarentino blush, something practically every police procedures in the United States does. We feed into the fear here, and thus, make it a part of our culture. There’s certainly something to be said for that.
Part of the problem red state people perceive with progressives is that progressives don’t generally take red state people seriously, but treat them like children who would do so much better if they just swallowed the red pill. That’s NEVER going to convince them. You don’t win anyone over by treating them as if they’re stupid, even if they sometimes act that way. Fox News and OANN didn’t come around because that source of news has always been there; it came about because liberal news treated them like illiterate imbeciles. After a certain amount of time of being told you’re a moron, you’re going to stop listening to that type of news and look for sources that don’t treat you like you’re stupid. When conservatives watch Fox News, they generally don’t feel threatened by the people who tell them the news; unfortunately, the style of news is designed to scare them of the bigger world, but newsflash: The liberal media sources have been doing that all along; the only positive conservative news has for its viewers is that it doesn’t insult them while scaring them.
The days of Walter Cronkite types of news coverage have ended. The news is no longer dispassionate and dry. Instead, it’s filled with tons and tons of news celebrities that have image consultants and follow specific agendas. In 1960, you watched three anchors deliver prepared news reports. In 2020, a dozen or so people sit around a desk and argue their personal opinions, and quite often even someone who tries to use facts gets drowned out by people who laugh and quickly change the subject.
And I’ll let you in on a little secret that progressives don’t really ever reveal to themselves: Elections are cyclical, which means that in one election cycle, they might convince a bunch of people to support their ideas, but in the next election those ideas will be dropped to the junk heap by a very impatient public. Just getting people to even participate in the electoral process is a chore, which is why whenever I hear poll numbers, I laugh because I realize that when someone on the street says he or she is definitely voting for one candidate or party but then when it comes to the election, he or she is too busy updating his or her Instagram page to worry about frivolous things like elections.
People are generally fickle, and they rarely vote for their best interests, even if they vote at all.
Years back, I was the security investigator for a major hotel chain, and I had been assigned to one of their large properties in San Francisco. As a somewhat superfluous member of that institution’s security department, it was never really understood where I stood in the chain of command, but it was always assumed that I was probably somewhere near the top, but never high enough to be one to make actual decisions. For a young man fresh out of the military, it was kind of comfortable because being in such a position meant access to whatever was going on without much of the responsibility for what was happening. If I had to sum it up, I was an executive at just looking good and being present for anything important happening.
Well, one of those things that happened was a major convention for a national music organization that sponsored a major headliner show featuring Huey Lewis & the News with an opening act by a young group Wilson Philips.
Now, at this time, Huey Lewis & the News was probably one of the biggest bands in America. And Wilson Philips, which acted as their starter band, was gaining a lot of traction with three hit songs that had been released earlier that year. So, it was expected that a lot of people were going to show up for this shindig to see the hottest show in town.
As this “important” security person, I was literally right there in the wings of the stage as the bands went on to perform. Around me were all sorts of music insiders who had serious clout with various record companies. And as I was dressed in a suit rather than casual wear, it actually appeared I was more connected to this industry than I was. In reality, I was the glorified security, but because my position was mostly a specialty of remaining undercover, people just assumed I was part of their crowd.
So, why am I sharing this? Well, one of the perks of this kind of position and such placement is that you begin to discover that musicians quite often are quite bored backstage and are constantly inundated with attempts by industry people to get their attention. My focus is always on just watching the crowd, so I kind of stood out because I was one of the few people there who didn’t appear all that interested in trying to gain the attention of the people who perform on stage. As a result, these stars had a tendency to sidle up next to me and start conversations.
And there were many of them, but one of them struck me as more interesting than the others. Chynna Philips, the lead singer for Wilson Philips, was wandering around backstage after their set, while Huey Lewis & the News were performing. She stood next to me and said: “Aren’t they great?”
I nodded and said, bluntly: “They used to be my favorite group.”
She seemed kind of surprised by my statement. I assumed most people probably spoke in awe of that band to her as she was basically delegated to being the starter band for a rock band that was extremely popular at the time. “Used to?” she said.
I nodded. “They’re kind of on their way out. Bands like yours are going to quickly replace them.”
She seemed actually pretty interested and then continued talking to me about Huey Lewis & the News, music in general and how interesting the industry was. Then she mentioned she needed to use the restroom, and did I know where one might be. I think she had realized I was some kind of higher up with the hotel because a couple of the security officers had walked over to me to pass on information to me while Chynna and I were talking. So, I walked her through the bowels of the infrastructure of the hotel to take her to the women’s restroom, choosing that path because I knew it would keep onlookers from intercepting her during the journey (something I’m sure happened quite often to a musician who was dressed in a very Hollywood-ish type ensemble for her performance.
During out trip, she shared a lot of interesting information about herself and the industry, and to be honest, I think she was just happy she was able to talk freely without having to answer questions as a “star”, which probably was the only kind of conversation she had been entertaining since gaining mass celebrity as a musician in a very popular band.
Anyway, this story isn’t really about that encounter, but to point out that she introduced a really interesting subject to me, something I hadn’t given much thought to before, and that’s that bands have an interesting life cycle that almost always seem to lead to inevitable conclusions. Even the band Wilson Philips made that journey, gaining mega fame almost overnight and then disappearing in a wisp of smoke so soon after appearing on the horizon.
What I hadn’t mentioned is that right before my conversation with Chynna Philips, one of the band members of Huey Lewis & the News was fuming backstage before they went on. This was while Wilson Philips was playing their set. But as I watched him, I had no idea what was bothering him, although he wasn’t focused on the music playing; something else seemed to have triggered him. And then they went on and did their full set, putting on what I honestly thought was one of their best performances to date. However, when they left the stage and walked by those of us on stage, I remember one of the stagehands saying “Good show!” to them as they passed him, and that musician gave him the dirtiest look I’ve ever seen from one man to another. I doubted the two of them even knew each other (that look he gave was more a “how dare you!” than a “Not this again!”). It was right about that time that I determined this band was about to end, and I didn’t know anything personal about any of their dynamics.
However, a short time later, the band fizzled and died.
This got me to thinking that most bands tend to go through this cycle of discovery, mega stardom and then collapse soon after. It’s almost as if they are only designed to last a certain amount of time before they implode and dissolve.
So, I thought I would focus on the different reasons why bands collapse after they reach their apex of success. So, generally, what are these reasons?
Break-up: The quintessential example of this is probably the Beatles, a band that broke into the stratosphere and then imploded one day after recording “Let It Be”. It’s that one band that so many wished would have gotten back together again, but which turned out to be sustainable with each member alone until, unfortunately, several of their members lost their lives. As of now, two members are still active in their own careers, but the two we lost were definitely legends all on their own. Other groups that have gone this direction (with pushes and shoves to regroup and try again), include: the Eagles, the Everly Brothers, and Fleetwood Mac (although many others probably fit this category).
Departure of a Main Influencer: This happens when one or a few members of a band decide to go their own way, and generally don’t come back. Examples of this include Van Halen when they lost David Lee Roth and Journey when they lost Steve Perry. The bands continue to try to recapture their momentum going forward, but in many cases they are never perceived to be the same powerhouse band they were back when they were previously together. This was somewhat the storyline of “This is Spinal Tap,” even though the band was mostly fictitious (but possibly better than some bands that actually took themselves seriously).
Bands That Take a Bad Turn: This is really the story I probably started telling when I first started this article, as this was, in my opinion, the direction that Huey Lewis & the News took. Back in their prime, HL & the News probably could do no wrong, and it was a band that was at the forefront of setting trends during this period. And then, out of nowhere, they sort of died off. Strangely enough, I kind of predicted this was going to happen the first time I heard their last big hit, Hip to Be Square, in which it really felt like the band was trying to carry-over its coolness factor by purporting to be so cool that it could do so while being a total square. It sort of set them off on a trajectory of obsolescence.
The Trend is Over: As much as I liked Wilson Philips, this was the direction they took when they released their second and third album. People were thrilled with their first album, but the follow-up albums felt a lot like they weren’t breaking any new ground. And they had received so much play time with the first album that people generally didn’t perceive any reason to want to continue buying much of the same. This is why a lot of groups really need to go big with their second and third albums, because the public is extremely fickle when it comes to music. If the audience doesn’t feel like the band is growing, quite often they will turn off the band going forward. A good example of bands and entertainers that have defeated this problem are Taylor Swift, Kiss, Madonna and AC/DC. While I definitely wouldn’t lump their music in the same category, their sustainability is about as legendary as the Rolling Stones.
A Primary Member Dies: This is quite similar to one of the main influencers leaving, except that there’s not going to ever be a reunited tour somewhere off in the future. Lynyrd Skynyrd, besides being one of the hardest bands to spell correctly, was already established as a powerhouse in the music scene when its lead Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and back-up singer Cassie Gaines died in a plane crash in South Carolina; while the band has tried to recover with new players over the years, it has never reached the apex it achieved during those earlier years. Other bands that lose one influential member to death quite often lead to their demise as well.
Unpopular Music Direction: From time to time, a band will have had a career of solid music and then take a completely different turn in its music, which immediately causes its audience to seek other entertainers instead. While this is a more subjective category, such bands can be included with this designation as Jefferson Airplane, Chromatics, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. What makes this category controversial and debatable is that quite often musicians that go this direction can make massive strides moving forward, but just in a completely different venue.
If anything can be said about the whole phenomenon of music sustainability, it’s that the artists rarely know what’s about to happen to their longevity before it happens. But that one evening that Huey Lewis & the News performed, it was obvious that that musician started to realize things were starting to unravel for his group. Either that, or he was just generally a sour person.
But one thing that was for sure was that Huey Lewis & the News stopped being the powerhouse it once was and no attempts to recover that lost popularity was ever going to succeed. So they may have been hip to be square, but unpopular was never going to be cool.
When I first found out that OnlyFans decided to allow pornographical material to continue, yet subscribers are still deciding to jump ship, my first thought was: It’s amazing what happens after everyone decides to jump ship after you make a stupid, horrible decision. This is a lot like that one time I told my billionaire, bikini supermodel astrophysicist girlfriend we should probably see other people. Didn’t go the way I planned.
The point is: OnlyFans has a spotted history as it is, and then once it revealed it was pursuing the dollar in hopes of becoming more mainstream, and then losing practically all of its subscriber base, they retracted, they did pretty much what ever critic of the site has believed was going to happen as a natural stage of evolution. At some point, they were going to stab themselves in the foot and then wonder why it hurts so much to keep on walking.
What’s interesting is that OnlyFans didn’t start out as a site geared around promoting sex workers. It was designed as one of those sites that hoped to attract celebrities who would use it to communicate with their fans. And then a guy who ran a cam girl site bought a controlling interest and then pimped it out to the cam girls who used his site. In a very short amount of time, it became known as a sex-friendly site, and then the pandemic hit. The rest is, well, history.
The site would probably continue to grow (and still might) on the backs of sex workers, but as often happens in this kind of situation, the owners ran afoul of payment processers who refuse to have anything to do with this industry. And thus, the situation that emerges today (after the backlash of starting to realize that its bread and butter was starting to jump ship and those that they wanted to attract still consider the site to be one that is cloaked in porn.
But this isn’t the first time this has happened in the Internet era. Pornhub went through this problem before (and survived) as did, and might even again, Patreon. Similarly, years back, during the early days of the Internet, I was a web designer for an adult bookstore, and the Internet service company they used had been sex positive, as was the manufacturer of the bookstore’s shopping cart. Well, one weekend in the middle of the night, the bookstore owner received an angry communication from the company that made the shopping cart, calling her all sorts of derogatory names and indicating that his company could no longer continue doing business with a purveyor of filth, immediately cutting off all access to the shopping cart. Shortly after that, the web site provider also contacted her and said something similar, stating that their company refused to do business with a porn business. Keep in mind, both of these companies had been profiting from an association with her company for over four years before these announcements and there had never been any concerns in the past. As a matter of fact, they had actually gone through lengths to get her business in the first place.
So, almost overnight, I had to find her a new Internet web site provider and then ran into a wall of companies that couldn’t promise not to take the same action one day concerning hosting her shopping cart. So, I sat down for two weekends and crafted a shopping cart for her from scratch, coding it in PHP.
The point is: She took care of her business regardless of the resistance she encountered because she was both patient and had perseverance. On a slightly amusing front, the two companies (the Internet web site provider and the company that made the shopping cart) both went out of business a few years later due to lack of clientele.
So, that’s kind of where OnlyFans is right now. I’ve been reading very interesting asides from those in the sex worker community who have vowed to move their content to other sites, while a few others seem willing to stick it out. This action by OnlyFans may prove to be a make or break incident, but either way, it should serve as an excellent wake up call for other companies in the future that dare to buck trends. The market corrects, but it doesn’t always correct in a favorable fashion.
Yesterday, I implemented a number of changes to my site, including the weblog itself. While I tend to do this every now and then just for the sake of keeping things up to date, my reasons this time around were a little more specific: It turned out that the themes and plugins I was using for my site were horrifically out of date, making it impossible to even add new content. Strangely enough, I didn’t notice this until I found myself trying to update the “last date updated” on the front page to realize that the site was no longer giving me specific permissions.
As I’d created my site from scratch back in the day and integrated WordPress to help build a sustainable weblog, I decided to revamp the site, completely changing the theme and then slowly updating specific parts of the web page. As I made each change, I started to discover the incompatibilities with certain segments I updated, so I started removing and replacing content. It’s amazing how over the course of a few years so much technology can change and fundamentally destroy other parts of your content due to older programs not interested in talking to newer ones. Anyway, so if you see a change here and there, it just means that I discovered something needed fixing or updating, and I’m just getting around to addressing it.
As for current projects (that aren’t the web site), I’m currently working on two novels (1991 and a series with the working title of Return to Camelot). I’m also embracing the C# programming language to develop my latest game, which is universe where your actions affect the future course of the universe and the surroundings encompassing that universe. Think of it as Ultima’s avatar, except the avatar doesn’t change; the entire universe changes due to your choices and lifestyle. A better way to think of it is if you decide to be very violent in your behavior towards NPCs, the world starts to become equally violent towards you as a result. It took me some time to figure out how this could be coded, but then it dawned on me that multiple string variables that track your progress would then be coded into an algorithm where based on a scale of 1 to 1000, using different scalable metrics, you’d slowly start to see changes implemented slowly in an evolutionary process where just doing one nice thing for an npc doesn’t mathematically achieve change in background because it takes a lifetime of behavior to influence the larger picture, and people have a tendency to make year end resolutions that don’t translate to actual behavior modification. Anyway, think of it as using mathematics to explain the concept of friendliness; people incapable of understanding such modified behavior will always consider it magic rather than science.
Anyway, just a short update. Hope you’re all doing well. And from the web page metrics, it shows that people are visiting the site, so if you’re one of those people who never comments, please comment because I’d really like to know that what I’m sharing here on a regular basis is actually of interest to anyone who might be following. Like Barry Allen says in Zack Snyder’s Justice League: “I need friends.”
There’s an interesting dynamic going on in the manosphere, which, if you’re not following this kind of content, you’d be very likely to have no idea it’s actually happening. But as I’ve mentioned in previous posts (and a few Youtube podcasts), I’ve been fascinated by this area of information, for both great content and some of the worst media I’ve come across in quite some time.
For those not familiar, the mansophere ranges from men going their own way (MGTOW) to dating strategies to a woman-hating rhetoric that resembles Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes with his “No Girls Allowed” Club. One of the more popular segments of this genre has been the whole “high-quality man” concept, where men purport to be the most valued type of men because they meet extremely unspecific checkmarks on female dating desires (i.e., six figure income, six feet tall, washboard abs, etc.). So, it’s not surprising that there are several podcasts out there where men claim to be exactly what these “high-quality men” are claimed to be. One of them happens to be a podcast called Fresh & Fit (which, if interested, you can find by searching for them on Youtube).
So, as I was researching a lot of this information (as I do with a lot of really strange topics), I started following this Fresh & Fit feed, and to make a long story short, it’s basically two African-American males in their young adulthood ages who sit around a table and ask questions of guests who came on their show. In most podcasts, they will have a large group of young women who all appear to have visited right before heading out to the Miami club scene, and then the two guys will continue to ask them questions about what they seek in men. And as you would expect, as their guests are almost always young (in their early twenties), generally attractive and quite often street stupid, they’ll go through their laundry lists of what a man has to be in order to attract their attention. After a while, you start to just hear their responses as noise because quite often a 19 year old girl who has done absolutely nothing in her life, other than have a somewhat lucrative Only Fans page where she sells her body for quick profit will indicate that a man needs to make at least $300,000 a year to even get her to blink, which basically translates to “hey, here’s a future cat lady who hasn’t bought her first cat yet”, meaning almost all of them are so in dreamy land that doesn’t exist, so that it becomes more comedy than anything else. Some of the men would prefer to go through online sites and check out the Best Platforms for Private Affairs in the UK that can ease their doubt of their self-worth.
But the main point that you finally end up with the Fresh & Fit podcast is that the two guys pretend they are high-value men that women should be fighting themselves over to even have a chance with them. In reality, they come off as desperate beta males, cosplaying as cool dudes, but it’s their schtick, so let’s just leave it at that. However, their approach to their podcast is that they are giving advice to the men out there (dating advice) and helping men to become their better selves. And while sometimes they do just that, most of the time, the podcast serves as a vehicle to allow the main guy of the two (Myron) to insult the women on the show, and women in general while acting like he has all of the answers because he has a podcast. The amount of times they try to raise their clout by talking about how many subscribers they have becomes very tiring and gets very old, almost like telling a potential girlfriend that she should date you because lots of women like you.
Anyway, one of the other podcasts I also watch is called Aba & Preach, and it involves two guys who basically address social topics and give their spin (or approach to them). What makes them unique is that they are very down to earth, really know their stuff, and basically call things as it is without ever turning childish in their approach. After a few years of watching their podcast, I’ve come to the conclusion that you can generally trust what they have to say because their worldly view rarely steers me wrong.
So, fast-forward, or reverse backwards, depending on your observation, Aba & Preach called out Fresh & Fit for some very specific content, pointing out that there were records of Myron actually telling women they had to give up sex if they wanted to be on the show and a bunch of other behaviors that went against the whole narrative of them being alpha males, and especially high-value men. The next day (or it might have been that night), Fresh & Fit did an episode where they acted like children and started making ad hominem attacks on Aba & Preach, and even went out of their way to start talking smack about Preach’s wife, who had nothing to do with the podcast whatsoever. This, in turn, led to a much more introspective criticism by Aba & Preach, which was both powerful and went over extremely well in the Youtube community. At the end of it, due to threats that were made from Fresh & Fit, Preach accepted a dare from the two Youtubers to box, and began to physically prepare to travel to Miami to do exactly that.
I should point out here that if you’ve ever seen Preach, you would not want that guy coming to your city to do any type of harm to you. He’s a big guy, and he has a certain disposition that indicates that he would back up everything he says with an equal amount of force. Myron and FreshPrinceCEO (his partner) seem to put off an air of being all talk, in comparison.
What happened next is kind of the point of this write-up. Fresh & Fit did a podcast the next day where they made a political apology, which if you’re not aware of what that means, they apologized to their subscribers for taking the wrong approach to this altercation. Aba & Preach responded with no intention of accepting the apology, stating, “the apology needs to be as loud as the insults” or something close to that. And they were right because at no time did their “apology” actually appeal to Preach, whose wife had been insulted, amongst other insults centered on Preach’s character, and even on his nationality and heritage. So, Preach has further indicated that he is moving forward with concluding the altercation as Fresh & Fit offered, in person and physically.
Today, FreshPrinceCEO made a podcast where he was buying a gun, kind of an out of the blue podcast that had no connection to any type of content either he or his partner has ever made. As expected, Aba made a statement on Youtube calling out FreshPrinceCEO on horrible optics and timing for such a podcast.
What’s really fascinating about this whole thing has been the response of the viewer base. For the most part, Aba & Preach have been hailed for direct, levelheaded responses and the commentaries have been nothing but positive. The commentaries on Fresh & Fit’s response has been horrible. Just yesterday, they lost 11k subscribers, which if you ask me, was the reason the “apology” was even attempted in the first place. They seem to be hemorrhaging members from their subscribers and while their most diehard followers support them, even on their own podcasts they are receiving all sorts of back and forth, rather than blanket support.
I find this whole thing to be really interesting because for the most part, what happens on the Internet rarely has ramifications, almost as if the realm suffers from the old adage of “any publicity is good publicity” or the opposite which is more of a cancel culture when you’ve upset the status quo and lose everything. The Fresh & Fit podcast seemed to be benefiting from the first axiom without realizing that ramifications can suck, and once they start to emerge, it’s like a slippery slope that doesn’t end until you’re at the very bottom of the hill with no way to get back up again.
So, over the next few weeks it should be interesting to see if they can survive this backlash, because I suspect that they are a lot like Hong Kong declaring war on China without realizing that might not bring the outcomes you want in the end.
A number of years ago, I ran into a conflict that I never encountered before but ever since then have never forgotten. You see, I was an editor for the opinion section of a small newspaper some years back, and I had printed the article of a young man who criticized a group of people who were local moped riders that happened to be part of a moped community. The immediate response from that community was not dialogue explaining why he was wrong, but instead an extremely hostile approach that included attempts to attack the very nature of the newspaper itself, including physical threats and intentions of causing actual physical harm. This type of behavior went on for several days over the next week, and it was an immediate education in how irrational and quick to arms certain members of the population can be, especially when the moped community we were talking about was generally a very pleasant and friendly sort whenever dealing with pretty much any other issue beforehand. Basically, what it taught me is that people can be easily led to very dark places in very short times, and people are generally on the verge of being very irrational and unfeeling towards any other person to whom they are not personally accountable.
Fast-forward a couple of decades to today, and I’d like to share with you an experience I encountered only a short time ago. Over the pandemic, I started to view a lot more Youtube programming than I had in the past, and at one point, I was trying to find videos on how to get better sleep, and I came across the ASMR community. Interesting community. But they’re not actually the ones I want to talk about. But what I discovered is that when you watch a certain type of content on Youtube, you start to receive all sorts of recommendations for other content that is somewhat similar, and through one strange connection to the next, the algorithms ended up recommending to me content that mostly caters to what I’ll refer to as the “man-o-sphere”, a place where videos seem to incorporate a lot of male commentators who seem to have a lot to say about the state of dating in America. And what I discovered was that it was content that was filled with some very angry voices.
The thing about this content is that Youtube has a really weird algorithm-recommendation process that seems to suggest more and more outrageous content, thinking that’s the natural progression of what you wish to pursue. So, what started off as videos to help me sleep, narrated by very kind, friendly women with soft voices, turned into angry, violent “my way is the only way” right-wing women haters. The sad thing is that the transition in recommended content did not really take that long to occur.
Anyway, I could talk about this content for hours, but that’s not really what I came to talk about either. What I wanted to talk about was something I discovered called MGTOW, which happens to stand for “men going their own way”, which is basically an approach that men make who have given up on ever pursuing traditional relations with women because of a belief of something called “market forces” in dating circles that seem to value this elusive end goal of high value men avoiding any involvement with women who can never seem to measure up to a system of goalposts that become harder and harder for anyone to ever achieve. And a lot of the evidence cited will generally be some very specific types of data that point out that over the years feminism has changed both men and women in ways that make the man and woman dynamic from history more adversarial than it’s ever been and now more of a man vs. woman dynamic that constantly feeds into a zero sum dichotomy where men always lose out unless they happen to be part of this mysterious one percent of the highest value men.
Now, a lot of this rhetoric can be pretty persuasive, even if a lot of it is often cloaked in the retelling of a lot of wives’ tales involving statistics that are quite often repeated over and over to sound authentic, but when I started investigating a lot of the studies myself, I realized how flawed so many of them were, meaning that even some of the commonly held understandings in the community itself were based on misinformation. And let’s just say that as an outsider to this community, I kind of came in with a doe-eyed approach and thought one day that I’d share my observations with the rest of the world, because while some of it was flawed, some of it was interesting enough that I thought my public contacts might be interested in some of this information as well, and then, well, just decide for themselves.
So, I created a Youtube report of my own that was a little over an hour long, and I posted it, expecting my usual cobweb-like response. Instead, I got that response I remember from the moped community some years back.
When I did my report, I was reacting to the MGTOW community that I had observed, and I wanted to put it out there for others to know this community was out there. I wasn’t really all that critical of the community, but just presented what I saw. But then made a couple of blatant errors. The first was not realizing that some of the sources I was referencing in the story weren’t really considered a part of the MGTOW community, but kind of a secondary community that I had not even known was a thing. You see, there were levels of what I will now call the man-o-sphere, which is broken up amongst different philosophies, one of which is the dating strategy community, another being the pick-up community, one being a strictly anti-feminist community, and then kind of in their own corner of this hemisphere, the MGTOW people. Well, because I had titled this story something like “Finding out about MGTOW” and then going into my observations and analysis, an immediate campaign of dislikes started from people who were adamant supporters of a very specific MGTOW philosophy AND community. In my years of doing Youtube, I don’t think I’ve ever received a dislike for a video, mainly because most of my videos are designed to inform or help people. And within minutes of posting it, I had a few dozen dislikes from people and some really heated responses in the comments that were basically just very angry that something they watched didn’t seem to treat MGTOW like it was the greatest thing since sliced butter. And strangely enough, there was basically nothing negative that was even shared about MGTOW and its philosophy. It was like some weird signal switch had been hit and now everything that followed would forever bathe the room in darkness.
After the continued negative attention, and a tiny sliver of positives and likes indicating people found the report fascinating, I just took the video down and decided to never do a video on that population ever again. I quickly came to the conclusion that they weren’t interested in discussion, or even educating anyone about anything. For a population that doesn’t appreciate when women call them out for toxic masculinity, the response was pretty damn toxic and completely out of the blue. If I learned anything, it was that some people don’t play well with others and have no desire to come to any common ground to raise a common conversation. It also sort of illustrated exactly what seems to be wrong with our country right now and why it’s not going to get any better. As long as people remain in silos away from each other, our country is forever going to continue to spread apart at the seams.
I know this sounds a bit depressing, especially as I haven’t written anything in some time on this blog, but I really wanted to share this, and I’d greatly appreciate any insight you might have to share in response.
To be honest, USS Discovery has always been one of those shows that I have a love and hate relationship with, mostly because the writing has often been really bad. The acting is stellar, and the casting is great, but sometimes the writing takes the inevitable “we don’t really have a solution for this, so we’re going to just fill it with psychobabble so we can get to the whiz bang stuff”. Or, “we’ll try to pull on heart strings by showcasing the one character who has nothing else to do but pull on our heart strings.”
Season Two kind of went a different direction because of the stellar casting of Anson Mount as Christopher Pike. And strangely enough, the writing wasn’t that bad either. Sure, there were moments of the same problems as before (“we don’t really have anywhere to go with this so we’re going to just avoid sharing actual information that normal people would ask so we can keep the audience in a state of confusion going forward” but aside from those moments, like the whole “strange stars in space” phenomenon, which was basically the premise of the whole second season, it was still pretty good.
To be honest, after the mid-point of Season One, the show became watchable again, regardless of its avoidable moments.
(spoilers ahead)
And then Season 3 came along. Season 2 left us with Discovery being thrown 1000 years into the future (a future that has only really been touched on narratively once through a Star Trek short called “Calypso” and a bit through some of the temporal war background of Star Trek: Enterprise when “Crewman” Daniels brought Archer to the 30th or so century.
Now, we were in completely uncharted territory. The closest to this we really got, aside from a few one-off moments throughout the rest of the franchise, like Star Trek: Picard or some of the “it could have happened” episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we’ve not seen much of the future of Star Trek’s future. Now, we were finally here (or there).
The first episode focused specifically on Commander Michael Burnham arriving in the 30th or so century and completely lost, spending the majority of her time teetering on whether or not she was gong to survive and whether or not she was going to figure out exactly when she arrived. We meet Book, a new recurring character and Sahid (I think was his name), an ambassador for a Federation that appears to have been more memory than prominent. Both of these new characters really do a great job of setting a scene for a dystopian future of the the far-off future, but still gives us a sense that there’s something still happening.
My only complaint on the first episode was more a feeling than an actual criticism, and that was that the premise for this future felt a lot like Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda where Dylan Hunt (the name that Roddenberry was originally planning for Captain Kirk’s character) wakes up from a wormhole accident and the Commonwealth (i.e., the Federation) has been wiped out, leaving him to have to rebuild it from scratch with the last starship (Andromeda). We kind of have the same scenario happening with Discovery, even though in the first episode, the Discovery has not made it to the 30th century yet, but because it’s the name of the show, we know it’s going to regardless. Even Book felt like Tier (not sure I have the spelling of his name correctly, but he was the Nietzschean outsider of that time who hooks up with Dylan Hunt, much like Book is now doing with Michael. And of course, Sahid represents the Federation, which is obviously what the cast is going to go about rebuilding to its former greatness.
Now, that criticism aside, the first episode was actually pretty good and strangely enough it had no members of the USS Discovery other than the commander herself, so it ended up being a fish out of water episode that tested how well the actress is able to show her acting chops. Further spoiler alert: She has them when the script doesn’t call for her to overact the scene.
But the one thing missing from the episode of Star Trek Discovery was, well, the USS Discovery.
The second episode is basically the response to that. And one of the more refreshing things they did with this episode was not focus 100 percent on Commander Burnham (Michael). And it made me realize how much of this series is based around this one woman saving the day, each and every episode so that every other character is basically Abbott to her Costello.
In Episode 2, the USS Discovery comes crashing out of the wormhole and literally crash lands in an ice landing that would make Deanna Troi seriously proud. And rather than, okay, we crash landed, so let’s all move on with the episode, they actually focused on the ramification of how impactful such a crash landing just might be.
This episode gave the secondary cast a chance to finally shine, so they weren’t just shadows of the main character’s actions. Saru, the former first officer made captain, BECOMES a captain here, showing that he’s not just a character filling a spot, but a person who has spent his career learning the things an officer learns that eventually leads him to have to lead when the time finally comes. There’s a brilliant moment where he and Ensign Tilly (a character that sometimes grates on my nerves as a sort of Wesley Crusher kid genius response to every dilemma) are on an away mission together. Saru chooses Tilly for numerous reasons, all of which make completely sense and really show actual thought behind the writers of this episode.
She’s scared, and he knows that, but in his strange paranoid all the time way, he shows how her fear actually comforts his own fear so that both of them benefit from being together. It’s a really touching scene.
The scene then moves to a futuristic western bar that we’ve seen hundreds of times in so many other stories, and of course, the martial arts fight whatever comes before her Georgiou shows up, meaning we’re going to have a “beat up bad guys” scene, so that happens as expected, but it leads to a brilliant display of Saru showing that they’re Starfleet, not a bunch of wandering thugs, and it becomes one of those few missing moments that Discovery is sometimes lacking at times.
Meanwhile, the crew is still on the USS Discovery trying to at least get the ship back up and running, and this is where we see some of the character development that the first two seasons was seriously lacking. And that was such a refreshing segment to experience.
And then there’s a huge attempt to get USS Discovery back up into the air again, and that’s when they are picked up by a tractor beam out of nowhere, and it’s one of those moments of “should be shoot while we have the drop on them, or should we answer their hail?” And Saru chooses the Starfleet way, leading them to finally come back into contact with Commander Burnham again.
It’s an episode well worth watching. So far, the third season is firing on all cylinders, and I hope it can continue doing so.
So, the second video is completed and uploaded to Youtube. One of the strangest things of having a somewhat defunct Youtube account is that getting traction is almost impossible. Even getting people to watch a video these days is difficult, even though the content is designed to help people who can definitely use the information.
Basically, had I been starting out in writing and found this information available, I would have been quite overjoyed.
It’s hard to understand people sometimes. Some of the stuff that’s popular on Youtube blows my mind at how simplistic and uninspiring it is, yet lots of people watch it. Oh well. Now I’m just griping for no reason. Here’s the video.
Well, I finally got around to doing it. My Youtube channel isn’t new, but for the longest time, I’ve wanted to use my Youtube channel to actually start illustrating just how to write a novel.
Up until this time, my Youtube channel has been used for a number of purposes, including talking about politics, uploading videos of my video lectures for the college courses I teach, and for videos of content that usually involves me vlogging about something or other. But I decided I wanted to do something a little more substantive with the Youtube channel, and now I’ve started this new project.
What this project will be is an attempt to walk you through the process of writing a novel, not by doing what I’ve historically done (and every other Youtube person has done) and that’s talk about writing a novel. But instead, while I write my current novel, 1991, I’m going to show exactly how the process of writing it takes place.
So, we’re talking stuff like how to design characters, how to build your setting, how to do research, outlining, building dialogue, handling the day to day stress of having to write a novel (which can really wear you down, if you’ve never prepared for this process before), how to change the story midstream, how to settle on a main character and little nuances that most people tend to just take for granted, but you end up having to pick-up as you go along.
My main reason for doing this project (the Youtube project) is because I realized that had something like this been around when I first started writing, it might have made the process of writing a novel so much easier. I’ve written 16 novels since that first one, so I’ve picked up a few techniques along the way, but it wasn’t always a walk in the park. Sometimes, it was a brutal slug match with overwhelming odds.
This is an attempt to help anyone else deciding to do this himself or herself just how this process can be stream-lined, or at least made easier and better.
