Tag: build your own platforms

The Future is Entertainment that Entertains, Maybe

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For the last ten years Hollywood has been making movies based on what they thought audiences ought to see instead of what they wanted to see.  This steady stream of girl-boss super hero and transgender romance stories have lost the studios literally billions of dollars.  I’ve been raving against this for years saying something will have to give and finally it has.

There’s a guy named Scott Cawthon whose twisted imagination came up with a story line where a Chuck E. Cheese-style restaurant becomes possessed by evil spirits and the animatronic animals start slaughtering the patrons.  He called it “Five Nights at Freddy’s.” He went from on-line storytelling to a video game to finally a couple of movies in the theaters that made hundreds of millions of dollars.  And the Rotten Tomatoes scores from the professional reviewers was 33% and the rating by customers was 86%.

So, what’s the lesson?  Find what the audience wants and give it to them.  And this is becoming more frequent.  A YouTuber named Markiplier self-financed a sci-fi horror movie called Iron Lung about a prisoner sealed in a submarine prison on a moon covered in an ocean of blood.  And once again there is a built-in audience from the game and story fans on-line.

Well, finally the actual studios are waking up and saying, “Wait a minute.  Why don’t we start making movies out of stories that people actually like?”  So, there are about a billion kids who play Minecraft so a Minecraft movie will make a billion dollars.  Duh!  Studios like Apple are starting to make science fiction and fantasy movies that piggy back on books that have actual audience appeal instead of left-wing ideological cachet.  It’s still barely detectable but without a doubt it’s the future.

Now, this isn’t targeted at me.  It’s for my grandkids.  They play the video-games that these movies are based on.  When I watch them it’s like some kind of fever dream.  The plots are crazy, the characters are cartoonish and the pacing is almost non-existent.  But no one is preaching.  It’s reminiscent of the slasher movies back in the eighties.  The audience was teenagers and there was no danger of anyone winning an Academy Award but the audience left happy and the studios made money.  This is the model that seems to be returning.

I was talking to one of my grandsons about this phenomenon and he provided a piece of supporting evidence.  He mentioned that none of his friends were going to bother to see the third Avatar movie because basically it’s the same movie recycled.  He said now that the CGI isn’t as cutting edge there’s really no reason to go listen to the same lecture about the military-industrial complex colonizing and oppressing space-aborigines for a third time.  Of course, that’s my take on what he said but it was interesting to me that he recognized the recycled aspect of the plot.  The Zoomers aren’t as helpless as some people paint them.  At least not the ones I’m related to.

Bad News – Good News

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So last night was the 97th Oscars.  Now, of course, I didn’t watch them.  I’m too old to waste several hours of my life watching boring awards show drivel about movies that no one in his right mind would actually watch and that’s even if seeing them was free of charge (which they are not).  I didn’t watch them but earlier I did hear about some of the best picture contenders.  One of them was the impossibly bad and unthinkably stupid “Emilia Pérez” which I mocked mercilessly in a post based on the movie trailer.  Another leading contender “The Brutalist” was a 3.5-hour epic about an immigrant architect from 1930s Hungary which includes the male protagonist being raped by his boss.  And a case could be made that wasn’t the worst part of the movie.  Matt Walsh reviewed it here so I was spared the horror of even watching the trailer.  And I hear the best picture winner was a movie called “Anora” which was about a sex worker that apparently contained a good 45 minutes of something resembling pornography.  Wow.

And so there we are for Hollywood 2025.  The best of the best are movies that no one would go to see and if anything actually entertaining somehow sneaks in then it will be panned by the critics and consigned to anonymity.  So that’s the way things have been run for the last fifteen years or so.  At this point even the wildly popular fantasy and superhero movies have been forced to conform to racial and gender social justice casting and plot requirements so that all the fun and excitement have been sucked out of them.  So, mission accomplished, Hollywood has murdered itself as an entertainment industry.  Requiescat in pacem.

Alright, let me try for the good news a bit.  Generation Z doesn’t go to the movies.  They play video games; they watch movies based on the video games they like.  And these movies about video games are written by “influencers” that play the same video games and have literally millions of young people following them on-line.  In other words, Netflix or some other media company will provide resources to an influencer to make a movie based on the fact that a guaranteed audience in the millions already exists for this product.

As an example, there is a guy on-line who reviews movies.  He calls himself “The Critical Drinker.”  He has 2.24 million subscribers and who knows how many casual watchers for his review videos.  He is also an author of suspense and espionage novels.  And because of his following (which is not particularly large as influencers go) he recently had a short movie made from one of his stories.  Now I’ve only watched ten minutes or so of this video but looking at the production quality, it’s equal to any of the series of this sort that gets made by Amazon or Netflix or the other studios that are taking away business from the old guard companies in Hollywood.  And recently I listened to a podcast where one of my favorite unwoke (meaning normal and entertaining) urban fantasy novelists Larry Correia was talking about these very things with The Critical Drinker.  And putting two and two together I’m guessing that people on my side of the political divide are thinking it might finally be possible to get movies made without the gatekeepers poisoning them or just plain stopping them as they’ve always done up till now.

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna.  A lot of the stuff that the kids watch is pretty goofy stuff.  The storytelling isn’t Dostoevsky.  In fact, it isn’t even Mickey Spillane.  But that’s alright.  You have to start somewhere.  The main thing is a pipeline has to be established where an audience and a creative type can trade money for entertainment without the woke gatekeepers controlling everything.  And that’s what I think is already beginning to happen.  Sure, it’ll start at the level of video game fan fiction.  But that’s no different from the pulp novels and the early movies like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  From such humble beginnings can come much better work.

Now, will I live to see anything worthwhile come of this?  Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 04FEB2025 – Reasons for Hope

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Points of optimism for you:
You say the Left controls most of the institutions; the schools, the universities, the Media, Hollywood, the book publishers and most of Silicon Valley.
Our schools are failing and school choice is getting bigger every day. Trump may well end the Dept of Education.
The Universities are losing students and power – that means influence as well.
The old media is dying. The new media (Twitter, podcasts, etc) is ascendant.
Hollywood is burning and will probably disperse into other states as CA is too expensive.
The legacy book publishers are becoming more irrelevant every day and will probably go through a period of consolidation and reduction. New publishers are emerging every day and self publishing is a viable option for eBooks.
The Tech Bros of silicon valley are coming over to our side.

Sometimes, all it takes is a leader. Like Trump.

Dream Big

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Another long day and another late-night post.  I didn’t see anything on the news-side worth discussing.  The pundits are milking the 50/50 presidential race for all it’s worth.  Trump, Harris!  Nobody knows how it will turn out!  Oh, woe is me!

Well, I’ll be busy right through 11/6 so I can wait for the result or the lack of a result on Election Day.

But what I’m waiting to see is who will step forward and provide real-life solutions for thriving in the post-freedom, post-affluence America.

And maybe I’m looking for something that can’t possibly exist.  But it seems to me that there are shards of the glory that was America strewn across the landscape of this country and if some visionary gathers them up and recombines them into something new but based on the old pattern, then he could assemble a foundation for a resurgent American identity.

Maybe one of the southern states can act as the incubator for some kind of resurgence.  DeSantis has Florida showing signs of taking the lead on questions of freedom and cultural sanity.  And economically it is showing strength.  Or maybe Texas will take the lead.

But that is what needs to happen.  We can no longer expect the United States as a whole to move in the right direction.  Powerful forces have decided to destroy the middle class in support of the looting of the stored-up wealth of this country by the elites.  We have to band together under the leadership of some clear-thinking individual who has a plan for saving the middle class and restoring this country to health.  Who knows?  If he is defeated in November maybe Donald Trump will attempt to fill that role.  That is assuming he isn’t tossed in jail by his enemies.  Or maybe it’ll be a group headed up by Elon Musk and others.  There have already been hints at something like this happening.

I’ll admit I have no proof for this idea.  Maybe nothing will happen and we’ll just drift down the wind toward a larger version of the post-WWII Britain where drab socialist ideas were allowed to turn Britain into a shadow of its former self.

But I think there is still an enormous amount of entrepreneurial dynamism diffused in the people who live here and with the right catalyst very great things could still be achieved.  And so, regardless of whether Trump or Harris is declared the winner in Tuesday’s little passion play, I think the next big development in our society will not be authored by the political establishment but rather targeted against that establishment.

Some will say I’m looking for a strongman; a Caesar.  And in a sense, I am.  But not in the way that Caesar ruled.  Rather I am looking for a man to declare war against the oligarchy that seeks to destroy the middle class.  I’m looking for someone who is plotting an American renaissance.  Someone who can harness the energy that still exists in this country and direct it and concentrate it on the problems that we are currently facing.

That’s a big question mark.  But I like to dream big.

Adapt and Thrive

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Sunday, I head back to the salt mines to dig out that salt.  I get back onto the galley and start rowing that oar.  I return to the mill and push that millstone round and round.  The mind deadening drudgery looms before me like towering wave that will roll over me and drown me in its awful size.  So let it be written, so shall it be done.

But for tonight I’m content.  I got plenty of sleep last night and I only had a couple of hours of lousy work today and even that was tolerable and unavoidable.  So good enough.

What I was thinking about today is that it’s time to move beyond the election and all of that way of thinking.  All of this anxiety over whether Trump will win or Kamala.  Living in a blue state it really hardly matters.  I already live under a woke communist regime.  Really, all that is necessary is to start thinking about what things I can control and what I cannot.  And just looking at things through that lens clarifies  my thinking and removes a lot of the anxiety that comes from depending on “magical” processes.

For instance, I supposedly have to vote for Trump.  Well, I have to vote anyway because there are local races that I can influence the outcome of.  So not voting for Trump would be kind of silly, so I will.  But I don’t imagine I’m making any difference by voting for him.  And whether he wins or not, my life won’t change very much at all, at least not for quite a while.  If Trump wins and a Republican Congress passes legislation that allows Trump to deport the millions of illegal aliens beyond partisan judges’ ability to block him, then eventually after several years I will notice some improvements in my quality of life.  And if he balances the budget and on-shores the jobs that were sent to Asia then I will see America start to revive.  But that’s a long time from now and I have a limited span on this planet.  So, this election is almost an academic exercise in political philosophy.

Instead, what will be interesting and useful is to try and find private endeavors and resources that individuals can utilize and patronize either collectively or individually.  For instance, if I ever finish my never-ending science fiction novel, I might decide to market it and advertise it by starting a go-fund-me page.  Well, even selecting something as ordinary as that is fraught with challenges because many of these crowd-funding companies are either run by or strongly influenced by left-wing zealots who police these sites looking to cancel anyone who doesn’t share their convictions.  So, researching the activities and tendencies of these types of sites is important if you want to avoid a potentially disastrous launch for a creative work like a book.

And the same applies for other commercial or cultural organization.  Especially if Harris is installed in the White House, I’m hoping that various enterprises will spring up to service an audience from our side of the political spectrum who need everything from entertainment, to news, to snacks, to educational services, to dating services, to you name it.  With the government monolithically leftist it will behoove us to become entrepreneurs and connoisseurs with respect to the things that will be unavailable from official sources.  And we’ll have to become very creative at avoiding government interference, which means we’ll have to become adept at camouflage and subterfuge.  And even that secrecy sounds like fun to me.  Belonging to a private club has its own pleasures.

So, as the election date approaches, I have a new attitude about the future and I think it will serve me better than what happened after the last presidential election in 2020.  In fact, it can’t help but be better, no matter who wins.

One Small Step in the Right Direction

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As all of the regular readers here probably know from my recent incessant whining, I’ve been horrendously bogged down with work.  Even on weekends, there is stuff I have to get done and it will only get worse for the next month or so.

Woe is me; woe is me!

But at the same time, I’ve been wanting to go see Matt Walsh’s movie “Am I Racist.”  I asked Camera Girl if she wanted to go with me and she rolled her eyes and shook her head.  So that complicated things because just abandoning her on a weekend to trek across state lines and eat up half a day seemed a little selfish to me.  So, I was shocked when on Thursday she asked me if I wanted to go see the movie.  Apparently, she figured it might cheer me up ahead of my marathon work schedule to go to this movie over the weekend.  I guess she really does like me.  So, I went on line to see what hours it was playing.  Well, it wasn’t.  The movie had gone from about a thousand theaters, down to something like four-hundred.  And since Dunwich really is in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t a single theater within a hundred miles of me.

Woe is me; woe is me!

When I stopped shaking my fist at the sky, I looked up the box office history for the movie.  The movie was only banking twenty- or thirty-thousand dollars a day at that point but it had earned over twelve million dollars over the course of its run.  And when you consider that the movie only cost a quarter of that to make, I was quite impressed by Walsh’s accomplishment.

Last year Walsh made a documentary called “What is a Woman” that was very effective at highlighting the insane and dangerous transgender movement that has convinced most of the medical establishment that it’s okay to treat children with puberty blockers and sex hormone therapy as a precursor to amputation of their genitalia.  And this documentary was watched by many millions of people on-line.  But this new movie was different.

This was something that people had to go to a movie theater to watch.  They had to plunk down cold hard cash.  And for that money they expected to be entertained.  And they were!  The reviews and rating by the people who actually went to the movie were extremely high.  It was a hit with the people who went to see it.  But the mainstream media boycotted reviewing it.  And this was after it opened in the top four box office spot.  And not against other documentaries.  This was against all the movies in theaters.  It was a financial success, but they refused to review it.

So, I didn’t get to see it.  Well, eventually I’ll see it online.  So that’s okay.  But the bigger story here is that finally, finally, someone is making movies for our side of the street.  And I hope the Daily Wire makes a ton of money doing it and I hope that gives ideas to a bunch of other “creative” people who want to make money but can’t seem to get people to go to the stuff Hollywood has been putting out lately.  Who knows maybe it’ll inspire Disney to make the imaginative leap and think, “Didn’t we used to make money hand over fist with that traditional stuff back in the stone age?  It looks like people still like that racist, sexist stuff.  Maybe we could do that again and make money for a change.”

Well, calm down!  Small steps, small steps.  Okay, now I’ve got a grip again.

But I have to confess I am encouraged.  This is the sort of stuff I’ve been waiting years for.  With the entry cost for making professional-looking motion pictures at historic lows and good writers, directors, actors and other movie trades unemployed because of DEI it doesn’t seem that it should be that difficult to make a profit if you give people a good story and stick to entertainment instead of hectoring them.

It’s a start.

Congratulations to Matt Walsh as His Movie Passes $10MM

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Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire have their first commercially successful documentary movie.  “Am I Racist” starring Walsh was made on a budget of $3MM.  Yesterday it passed the $10MM mark.  For any movie tripling your budget in sales is considered a success.  But for a documentary it’s a miracle.

Let’s hope this is the first of many profitable movies for the Daily Wire and every other conservative outfit that combines entertainment value and reality.

Without Wincing

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It’s Wednesday night and I’ve been watching some YouTube videos by right-wing Hollywood types; Nick Searcy, Andrew Klavan, Steve Deace.  These guys have made the transition from Hollywood actors and writers to conservatives who want to create content that doesn’t outrage their convictions.

And listening to them talk about the blacklisting and the gatekeeping you can’t help but feel discouraged.  And look at Disney where they’ve lost more than a billion dollars in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars series in the last year or two.  Even the remakes of the legacy Disney fairy tales are scaring away the parents.  Would these losses make them reconsider what they’re doing?  Nope.  Doubling down doesn’t even begin to describe their behavior.  It’s pretty depressing.

But I think I detect a hint of desperation.  It seems the strategy is to monopolize the entertainment choices utterly.  It’s almost as if they’re afraid people will find out that movies that are entertaining can actually exist.  And it makes sense.  Even they must know that their stuff is for the most part unwatchable.  So, all they can do is blockade anyone else trying to get funding and book theaters.  And so far, that’s worked.  But slowly, slowly, even glacially some stuff is leaking by.  So far, it’s all been Christian movies.  But the definition of what’s a Christian movie is being stretched.  Last year a “Christian horror movie;” Nefarious made $12 million from box office and streaming off of a $1 million total cost.  That’s a very nice return on investment.  Compare that to Disney spending $3 billion and getting back $2 billion.  Negative return on investment, not so great.

Then there was Netflix putting out the comedy specials by Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais.  Netflix’s own employees attempted to block the showing of these specials.  They saw these comedy routines as transphobic and hateful.  But Netflix decided that they need money more than they needed virtue signaling to their employees.  Another good sign.

Now conservative social media outlets are trying their hand at making movies.  The Daily Wire has made a couple of forays into comedy.  I don’t think they’ve succeeded yet but I give them full marks for trying.  Eventually somebody is going to make a stab at it and hit pay dirt.  And when that happens there will be a lot more.  Netflix is already one foot in the door.  All they’ll need is for a non-woke film maker to figure out the formula and they’ll be setting up shop and pumping stuff out.  There hasn’t been a decent comedy in a decade and if one studio starts putting them out, they’ll end up printing money.

So, I think we will get some alternatives to Hollywood.  And we’ll get it by supporting it ourselves.  What was that stupid Obama mantra?  “You are the change you’ve been waiting for?”  It’s horrible to realize but it’s actually true for our side.  We will have to stand up all these new platforms ourselves.  We’ll have to buy the tickets and take out subscriptions and buy books and go to plays just to make sure there actually is a non-woke alternative to all this awful crap they keep pumping out.

But finally, one fine day, Disney and Time Warner and NBC-Universal and whatever other woke behemoths there are will wither away all together and we’ll look out over a landscape where girl-boss jedi and Captain Marvel have been relegated to senior living facilities with a maximum of three cats and one bottle of wine a night.  And nobody declares their pronouns and spiderman is a man.

And on that day, I’ll bring my first great-grandson to the movies without wincing.

New Identities and Myths

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The Left has gone to great lengths to tear down the American Identity and its Myths.  By foisting identity politics into the center of the culture and openly destroying all the historical icons; The Founding Fathers, various heroes and even the institution of the family; they’ve snapped the bonds that united the people living here.  Now this was done intentionally to encourage strife between people based on race, sex and sexuality.

And to a very great extent they’ve been wildly successful.  I can attest to that personally.  They’ve managed to make patriotic allegiance to the current regime in Washington look like a sad joke.  And they’ve drained the joy out of sports, fraternal organizations and even the Boy Scouts.  Even many mainline Christian denominations have been infected with woke hatred for what this country used to be.

Wildly successful.

So, all that’s true.  They’ve smashed the culture down to the ground.  But at the same time, that means we’re free to build from the ground up.  We can keep whatever we want from the old.  We can toss out whatever no longer suits us and we can add in whatever helps us to build a new identity and new myths.

And I’m sure it’s already happening.  When the Left rejects the Fourth of July and embraces instead “Juneteenth,” it allows us to take ownership of the Fourth and make it what we want it to be.  Maybe it can have a double meaning.  It looks back to the original founding of the country but now it can also stand for a new declaration of independence.  We can declare ourselves independent of the coercive guilt that the Left tried to force on us.  We can begin to build our own organizations and platforms and companies that serve our needs.  Eventually we’ll build a new political party that will replace the Republican Party too.

But most important we’ll create new myths to replace the old ones that have been shown to be obsolete.  These things will be the hardest of all to replace.  The hardest one to lose was the myth that all Americans were brothers.  That despite all of our differences and squabbles when the chips were down, we would all band together to fix problems and strive to make America the shining city on the hill where our children would inherit a better and richer world than we had.  But the Left has burned that dream in the streets of the George Floyd insurrection.  We are not one nation and the Left is not under God and liberty and justice is not for all but only for the favored ones that the regime elects.

So that’s what we’ll have to do.  We’ll make our own rules and our own ways of working with each other and against those who hate us.  And we’ll come up with stories that explain how things work in the new world we now live in.

Maybe it won’t be a single new identity.  The days of a single culture or even a couple of cultures may give way to a host of different identities.  I could see the Hispanic people dominating the Southwest and the Northeast remaining as the old New England identity mixed with a hodge-podge of things added.  The Old South might rise again.  But what won’t happen is a return to what was.  You have to believe in a myth to keep it alive and the old American myth is as dead as a dodo.  And no amount of flag waving or exhortations for God to bless America can bring it back.  The Left buried it and they’ll have to live with the consequences.

A Sanity Check on the Revolution

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As another presidential election day approaches people are once again wondering if things can get better.  Will Trump be disqualified from running?  Will he win?  If he wins, can he accomplish any of the radical reforms that are desperately needed?

Of course, there’s no agreement on what will happen.  Opinions are all over the place.  But it’s my contention that nothing meaningful will happen until change begins to occur outside of Washington.  Wahington is so corrupt and power is so diffused between the various branches and agencies of government that turning the ship of state is a glacial process.

I think the change has to occur in state capitols and in private organizations.  And a little of that has begun.  I guess the clearest signs are in Florida where a Republican governor and legislature have begun to effect meaningful change in school and colleges.  Or look in Texas where their Republican politicians have taken steps to confront illegal aliens flooding across their border.

These are important steps; necessary steps.  But they are not enough.  The next step is for private organizations; for-profit and not-for-profit corporations to begin providing the choices that make up the alternative to the Woke Matrix that we’re all embedded in.  We need stores willing to sell us books and movies that don’t adhere to the precepts of the new orthodoxy.  We need a social media that allows free speech.    We need organizations to take the place of the Boy Scouts and the other captured social groups.

And even in these things the very first steps have been taken.  Elon Musk has challenged the government and the woke capitalist hierarchy by allowing relatively free speech on X.  That actually is huge.  Companies like the Babylon Bee and the Daily Wire have begun making entertainment that crosses all the lines that the Left has drawn.  Now none of these companies are any threat to Disney or even the smallest entertainment company but they are a beginning and a beacon for anyone else who would like to provide much needed choices for people on the Right.

And someone like Tucker Carlson is another trailblazer.   He is stepping into the space left open when Fox News allowed itself to be bitch-slapped into submission by Washington’s stooges.  He is willing to say what he actually thinks about the banana republic tactics of the Justice Department and the other organs of the Deep State.  And there is a small cadre of other reporters on the Right (and the Center-Left) who have the guts to speak out when thugs in our own government use gestapo tactics on Americans in high places and low.

But all these cases are embryonic; they’re just tiny buds and shoots of the forest of alternative services and businesses that are needed.  We need private schools and state vouchers to make them competitive.  We need entrepreneurs with deep pockets to emulate what Elon Musk has done.  They need to cater to the 30% – 50% of the country that are sick of Dylan Mulvaney and LGBTQ Snow White and Drag Queen Groomers and everything else that the current Federal/Educational/Commercial-Complex is pushing.

So, my sanity check says that right now the revolution is almost impossible to detect.  But you just barely can.  And believe it or not that is enough to keep me on board.  The body has a pulse.  Breathing is irregular but ongoing.  There are efforts to resist the madness and where they are pushed, they show results.  A bunch of states have banned trans-surgeries and puberty blocking drugs on children.  That’s huge!  And it happened because a few people at the state level spoke up and said it was wrong.  And now that example is giving other people courage to challenge the AMA and other professional organizations that knuckle under to fringe activist groups.  Lawsuits are being brought that will punish doctors and other professionals that are doing irreparable harm to children and even adults.

Things are beginning.  But all of it is so tiny in relation to the size and power of the opposition that it is daunting.  But what I believe is most lacking is a powerful charismatic leader to organize the disparate efforts in all the fields that, put together, could provide an identity and a unity to the Americans who are shunned and demonized by the present regime.  Who will step forward and make that happen?  That’s the next step.