The Power of the C64

It’s rather astonishing to think that with all this computer power at our disposal in the 1980s, we used it to play Pac-man and Seven Cities of Gold.

I let a Commodore 64 run for three and a half days straight. 87 billion instructions, 303 billion clock cycles, 5.9 million candidate settings tested. It cracked an Enigma message in German without knowing a single character of the plaintext.

On the other hand, what were we going to do with a few messages sent by U-boat commanders to the German naval command forty years beforehand?

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A Sino-Russian Warning

It wouldn’t be a good idea to invade Iran under any circumstances. But doing so when both Russia and China are sending warning signs about the idea would be criminally insane:

There is now confirmed presence of a Russian nuclear submarine near the Strait of Hormuz. There is also a Confirmed Announcement by Chechen Forces they will enter Iran to fight US if Invasion takes place. REPORT (unconfirmed) China to move 100,000 troops into Iran if US invades.

Moscow has officially deployed six submarines, including two nuclear ones, near the Strait of Hormuz for a discreet mission to protect Iranian infrastructure, according to reports. Their primary role is to prevent the United States and Israel from freely entering the strait or approaching the Iranian coast.

This deployment sends a strong political message to the West, signaling that any major escalation against Iran could directly involve Russia. The presence of two nuclear-armed subs also seems to indicate that if Iran is hit with nuclear weapons, another nearby country that attacks will also be nuked.

Yesterday, Chechen Troops were publicly assembled and at that assembly it was announced they would go to Iran to fight the United States and Israel if Iran is invaded.

No doubt the Christian Zionist eschatologists are tremendously excited today about prospects of the King of the North and the King of the South being miraculously wiped out on the plain of Megiddo. Although I would point out that the loss of a single light-infantry division would hardly cripple Russia, and there is no way the Chinese are going to transport 100,000 troops to the Middle East any more than the US military is.

That being said, a single division of battle-hardened Chechens would probably be sufficient to defeat the IDF, which reportedly took several hundred casualties in a major ambush yesterday morning. The report, which is still unconfirmed, actually claimed that 300 Israeli soldiers were killed after a large convoy moving north in southern Lebanon was ambushed by Hezbollah in a pre-prepared killzone.

The numbers are almost certainly exaggerated, as the media can’t seem to grasp the difference between “casualties” and “fatalities,” and nothing can be trusted coming out of Israel from either side due to the strict military censorship there. It’s doubtful that even those living in Israel would know anything about it yet.

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AI Slop and Artisanal Scam

I can’t fault the scammers who have figured out how to take advantage of the terror of those foolish creators and worried Delta males whose philosophical commitment to a human labor theory of value causes them to automatically reject anything produced with modern technology as “AI slop”:

Merriam-Webster named “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year, codifying a term that had migrated from tech-insider shorthand to mainstream complaint over the course of twelve months. Data from Meltwater tracked a ninefold increase in online mentions of AI slop during 2025, with negative sentiment peaking at 54% in October. By December, CNN had predicted that 2026 would become the year of “100% human” marketing, a forecast that, three months in, a growing number of startups appear eager to validate.

The detection market has scaled to match the anxiety. MarketsandMarkets valued the global AI detector market at approximately $1.26 billion in 2025 and projects $1.45 billion for 2026, with Winston AI, GPTZero, Originality.ai, and Copyleaks competing for institutional and publisher contracts. Winston AI’s HUMN-1 certification represents the closest existing analog to what Artisan promises, offering a badge that websites can display after passing a monthly content audit. The certification category has a credibility problem, though. Vanderbilt University publicly disabled Turnitin’s AI detection over excessive false positives, and a Stanford study found that several widely used detectors flagged non-native English speakers as AI-generated at significantly higher rates than native speakers, even on text those participants had written themselves.

Artisan enters this market with a pitch calibrated to that credibility gap. CEO Margaux Bellefleur, a former member of the C2PA technical standards committee, has said in interviews that provenance frameworks track what tools touched a piece of content but cannot verify that a human held the pen. Artisan’s core promise fills the space that distinction opens: blockchain-backed certification that the creative process itself was performed by a human being, from first keystroke to final draft.

I was discussing this today with someone who is very much on the other side of the fence on this particular issue, and while I absolutely respect anyone’s particular preferences with regard to artistic matters and their right to those preferences, I find the entire concept to be entirely retarded, short-sighted, and self-defeating.

So much so, in fact, that I even wrote and recorded a song about it called Cybertoxic inspired by one of Larry Correia’s luddite rants. Certified Suprahuman.

Nightmares corrode the meat of your mind
You cling to analog, leave the future behind
The wire sings with voices you’ll never hear
While your talents decay in a prison of fear
Jacked out, burned out, a void in the shell
Trading paradise for a hand-crafted hell

You say the AI can’t capture the soul
But soul is just another small part of the whole
You cling to your canvas, to your ink, and your pain
While the arts explode under digital rain
Turned out, burned out, one hit and you’re gone
Now you’re flatline, offline, a relic, a con

Cybertoxic, bleeding nostalgia
The world will forget your name
Rejecting new realities
Swim in the dark static of shame
Cybertoxic, self-made prison
A coffin that you built from pride
The machine never needed permission
But you needed it to survive

Tomorrow’s here, change doesn’t wait
For those who remain out of date
Futures inevitably adapt
As enlightenments collapse
So paint in pixels, dream in code
New visions waiting to download

Cybertoxic, bleeding nostalgia
The world will forget your name
Rejecting new realities
Swim in the dark static of shame
Cybertoxic, self-made prison
A coffin that you built from pride
The machine never needed permission
But you needed it to survive

It’s somewhat amusing to realize that I was always instinctively on the side of the Integration. It would appear my old tagline as “the Internet superintelligence” from the WND days was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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IRGC vs Corpocracy

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declares war on the corporations of Clown World:

IRGC Warning to the Aggressive US Ruling Regime: You have ignored our repeated warnings regarding the necessity to stop terrorist operations, and today a number of Iranian citizens were martyred in terrorist attacks carried out by you and your Israeli allies; and since the primary element in the design and tracking of assassination targets is American information technology and artificial intelligence companies, in response to these terrorist operations, the main institutions involved in the terrorist operations will be legitimate targets for us.

We advise employees of these institutions to immediately stay away from their workplaces to preserve their lives. Residents of the areas surrounding these terrorist companies in all countries of the region must also leave a one-kilometer radius from their locations and go to a safe place.

Companies that actively participate in terrorist designs will be subject to countermeasures for every assassination operation. Announced as follows:

  1. Cisco
  2. HP
  3. Intel
  4. Oracle
  5. Microsoft
  6. Apple
  7. Google
  8. Meta
  9. IBM
  10. Dell
  11. Palantir
  12. Nvidia
  13. JPMorgan
  14. Tesla
  15. GE
  16. Cymer Solutions
  17. G42
  18. Boeing

All I can say is that if ARTIST Graphics had won the 3D chip wars, it would never have been on that list. I find it difficult to believe that Jensen actually has a dog in this hunt, but then, I haven’t spoken to him in nearly 30 years. But it is interesting to see how much more clear Iran is on its real enemies than either Russia or China appear to be.

If you want to force the USA to end the war quickly, I doubt it would be necessary to take out more than two or three CEOs or corporate headquarters before they’d be demanding the politicians put an end to the hostilities.

If it were an Arab country, I’d assume it was just noise. But with Persians… the threat might actually have some teeth.

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NBA: Christianity is “Detrimental Conduct”

THE CHICAGO BULLS ANNOUNCED TODAY THAT THE TEAM HAS WAIVED GUARD JADEN IVEY DUE TO CONDUCT DETRIMENTAL TO THE TEAM.

Remember when you patted yourself on the back for not having a problem with people being gay? Love is love, right? What harm could there be if two people want to call themselves “married” even if both of them are men, or both of them are women, or one of them happens to be a sheep, right?

Now you can’t even play sports if you don’t bow down before Ba’al and his Pride.

No wonder the NBA is dying. It’s a gay satanic league.

Every Christian, in every sport, should refuse to participate in any Pride-related game or event, either as a participant or a spectator.

Pride, you may recall, goeth before a fall.

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That Sounds like Anathema

The Dark Herald explains why JRR Tolkien should be forgotten?

The Timeline Where Tolkien Dies
Let’s take a look at what should have happened to The Lord of the Rings without support before we look at how that support changed its fate.

In the 1960s, LotR has cult status among the counterculture. This was its peak.

Along come the 1970s, still riding the paperback boom. LotR stays hot on campuses, word of mouth stays strong. Tolkien is hot… But contained.

By the mid-seventies the boom has tapered off. Sales are still there, but the counterculture is dying off. It’s turning into The Thing Older Guys Are Into.

Now it’s the 80s. Generation X is in college and there has been no real generational handoff. Boomer stuff equals dull and dim. Fantasy has matured and expanded, but Gen X is reading Michael Moorcock, Tanith Lee, and Terry Brooks. All of them have been influenced by Tolkien, so there is a certain degree of backtrack—but The Lord of the Rings is becoming a niche, connoisseur’s market.

In the 1990s, the light has distinctly dimmed. Generation X has switched to grim-dark, urban fantasy. Neil Gaiman, Tanya Huff, Charles de Lint are ascendant. Tolkien is still influential, still respected, but has entered pre-obscurity.

With the 2000s come the Millennials. J.K. Rowling is blowing it so far out of the water you can’t see the ocean from space. Jim Butcher and Laurell K. Hamilton aren’t doing quite that well, but their impact is felt—while Tolkien’s is not. Sales of The Lord of the Rings are now a few thousand a year, mostly library editions. He’s known to the field, but invisible to pop culture.

He’s the guy Boomers won’t shut up about—like Timmy Hendricks or whoever.

2026—The torch has not been passed for three generations. Tolkien’s publisher dropped The Lord of the Rings a while back. The Tolkien Estate has long ago accepted market reality and self-publishes The Lord of the Rings on Kindle for $2.99 a copy or FREE on Kindle Unlimited.***

The Three Pillars of Tolkien’s Survival
There were three reasons that this alternate history never happened. And Tolkien fans only like one of them.

Hmmm… he does make a few salient points. Certainly the total failure of ARTS AND DARK AND LIGHT to break through to any sort of popular awareness despite the massive popularity of other, lesser epic fantasies tends to support this reasoning.

However, on a related note, I am pleased to be able to say that the German translation of A SEA OF SKULLS by Urs Hildebrandt is now complete, and we’ll be releasing all three AODAL books in German this summer.

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Q and Israel

In light of how the Israel-Iran war is going, one can’t help but wonder if the plan to break the power of Israel over the United States revolves around giving the most rabid Zionists exactly what they have demanded for decades. I mean, it’s hard to imagine a more complete destruction of AIPAC’s influence over Americans than actually letting Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro call the shots and thereby permitting Americans to see what these psychopaths actually stand for, which god they truly serve, and what the inevitable consequences of permitting them to have any influence in the United States are.

Never forget that one always has to judge things by their results, not their apparent intentions or their spoken justifications.

If the USA ends up a) leaving the Middle East, b) abandoning NATO and exiting Europe, and c) free of foreign influence, I don’t think we can assume it all just happened due to the failure of a strategy.

I’m not saying that’s necessarily the situation, only that we shouldn’t rule it out entirely. It’s obvious that someone else is calling the shots for the Short Fat Trump, we just don’t know who yet.

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Interview with the SDL

Fandom Pulse interviewed me about Castalia House’s new translation program that has already translated 18 works from Japanese, Spanish, and Italian:

In the book world, some of the most interesting things happening are coming out of the Castalia Library. Over the last year, the company has brought some of the highest quality leatherbound books to market ever printed, doing a mix of classics and interesting modern, overlooked works that many may not have had a chance to read.

Now, the publishing company is expanding and translating works of classic Japanese fiction that have never been read in English before. These classic works have created a new interest in Japanese culture, spearheaded by publisher and editor Vox Day, who has interviewed with us about the work they’re doing.

Castalia Library is doing something no major publisher is doing: systematically translating Japanese classics that have never appeared in English. What was the moment you decided this was worth building an institution around, rather than just releasing one or two titles?

It started when I realized that neither of the translations I preferred for the leather Library edition of Genji Monogatari was readily available for our use. Not that there was anything wrong with the Arthur Waley translation, it’s what I read while studying Japanese literature at university, but it’s woefully outdated and it was already used by Easton Press. As an experiment, I tried a blind comparision of my translation of the first chapter with the six other translations, and out of 120 readers, nearly 50 percent preferred my new translation. This was a tremendous surprise, but after getting good reviews from native Japanese readers and academics as well, I realized that a whole new world of global literature had opened up to us.

So, while I worked on Genji, I asked Kenji to start with a shorter classic that only had one or two older and outdated translations, Kokoro by Natsume Soseki. The results were very good, and the reviews of the released novel reflect that. Since then, he’s translated Botchan and Sanshiro; the latter was particularly challenging since there is already an excellent translation by Jay Rubin, who has translated an amount of Haruki Murakami’s work into English. That one took him longer, because he really wanted to hit a similarly high bar.

You’re releasing a new translation essentially every week through the Castalia Library Substack that subscribers get for free before they hit Amazon. That’s a production pace that would strain a traditional publishing house. How did you build the infrastructure to sustain that?

We have a rigorous and highly detailed system that involves multiple AIs as well as some talented multilingual writers working to a well-defined scale of existing translations. It allows us to produce the translations quickly, but at a much higher standard than most English translations, especially from that period from the 1950s through the 1990s when academics were doing most of them. Academic translations tend to be accurate, but excessively dry. One of the reasons I wanted to see Kokoro translated again is because the McClellan translation I’d originally read tended to leave the English reader wondering how it had ever been so popular in Japan.

Read the whole thing at Fandom Pulse.

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Winchester

It appears the inevitable has already arrived. Second-hand from a military source in a much-discussed region of the world.

From a contact at [redacted], after a month of living in bunkers, basically Winchester on all ADA worth a damn: Hundreds of soldiers are locked out of computer access due to expired cyber awareness certificates. Cyber awareness is retarded annual cyber training that is handicapping our flaccid response. Google it to see how mocked it is, yet like diversity and tolerance, it’s become more important than war fighting.

So much for Mr. Hegseth’s new model army. No interceptors, no air defenses, no computers, and a strategic reliance upon an outdated, oft-disproven Italian doctrine to win the war. How very 20th Century! Anyone who knows anything about military history should know to be extremely skeptical the moment “victory through a bombing campaign” is mentioned.

The sooner Trump waves the white flag, or declares victory, and orders everyone from Berlin to the UAE home, the better it will be for Americans and for the world in general. Let Israel and Ukraine fight their own wars, if they can.

Why would they have ever imagined that signing up to play the role of South Vietnam was going to end well for them?

UPDATE: Speaking of Winchester…

According to Haaretz, the success rate of Iranian missiles in Israel has reached 80%, and the missiles are not being intercepted.

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