Tag: culture - Page 44 - Kairos

io9 Reports on the Dragon Awards. Misses the Point

Gawker Media-owned science fiction blog io9 weighed in on Dragon Con's announcement of the finalists for their inaugural Dragon Awards. As anyone who's been following the controversy over the Hugo Awards will have come to expect, io9 completely missed the point. You don't really need to look any further than the…

August 15, 201624 Comments

Breitbart Reports on My Shadowban

Breitbart's Allum Bokhari reports on Twitter's ongoing shadowban of my account: There have been widespread reports that Brian Niemeier, a Hugo Award-nominated sci-fi author, has been “shadowbanned” on Twitter, with his tweets no longer appearing in peoples’ notifications or feeds. According to Niemeier, his followers are reporting that “they aren’t…

August 3, 20163 Comments

Unpersoned by Twitter’s Deep Shadowban

Having written before about Twitter's nasty penchant for censoring and outright banning users who deviate from the company's rigid left wing ideology, I fully expected the Twitter thought police to come for me. Milo Yiannopoulos warned as much. I just didn't expect them this soon. Late Friday afternoon: friends on…

August 1, 201624 Comments

Over the Target

Denizens of Reddit's deepest bowels have taken umbrage at my observation that Hollywood is now a propaganda machine. You heard it here first ladies: your existence in popular media is propaganda. Even though TFA became one of the highest grossing movies of all time and was pretty much universally well-liked,…

July 26, 2016

When Is a Movie Not a Movie?

When it's a cynical propagandistic cash grab. Actually, we can scratch the last part now that Ghostbusters 2016 has failed to beat the opening weekend domestic box office take of Ghostbusters II. Here are the numbers Ghostbusters II: $29,472,894 (June 16, 1989) Ghostbusters: $46,000,000 (July 17, 2016) At first glance I seem to have…

July 18, 201620 Comments

Reminder: There’s No Voting Our Way out of This

[Note: this post was originally published on 12/18/2015. In light of recent events, it seemed expedient to repost it.] A previous post on how the tide is turning against legacy media and its Leftist bias drew commenters who rightly observed that I offered no solutions for the current political crisis.…

July 5, 20163 Comments

Declan Finn’s Public De-Pantsing of Captain America Writer Nick Spencer

Do read Declan Finn's merciless fisking of the latest hack whom Marvel Comics has tasked with desecrating one of their iconic characters. A sampling of highlights: It’s a really funny thing, there was not an enormous amount of debate about the story. We do our creative retreats and this was a…

May 31, 2016

Earth vs. Twitter: This Time It’s Personal

Twitter's suppression of conservative and libertarian users has incited an exodus of high profile figures from the embattled social network. It's been rightly said that Twitter, as a private sector corporation, is free to ostracize any user demographic it wants. Targeted users are just as free to leave the platform.…

February 27, 20162 Comments

Sad Puppies: Cognitive Dissonance Makes Our Enemies Oblivious

Predictably, my recent post about how advances in media technology are driving the Sad Puppies phenomenon--and the hostile reactions of its detractors--drew hostile reactions from SP's detractors. I argued that new tribes of science fiction fans are forming around movies, video games, and eBooks; leaving the New York publishing establishment ever…

February 14, 20166 Comments

Sad Puppies: Lords Temporal and Spiritual

Last time, we talked about the drastic changes currently underway in sci-fi fandom, and the media that are driving those changes. People with their fingers on the pulse of fandom have observed that SF is becoming more tribalistic. They're right. Due to the dominance of movies, TV shows, video games,…

February 1, 20168 Comments