Notable things I saw over the week:
- Yakov Merkin's campaign for "Light Unto Another World" ends in four days. He hit his goal, so you're guaranteed to get it now if you buy in. Do so here.
- Cirsova Magazine closed its submissions period with a record high amount of submissions and nowhere near enough to buy them all. That means a lot of rejections, which sucks, but it also means that the magazine has a growing audience of readers and writers.
- The Manga domination of North American comics continues, such that even Big Two normies are noticing now.
- Nick Cole and Single White Medusa's Tolkien podcast hits its second episode. It's on Substack, which is here. You'll also want the CTRL ALT REVOLT podcast, here.
- Hit pieces on Eric July keep accelerating, and now there's astroturfed "independent voices" coming after him and others.
- There is good reason to believe that DC Comics will be shut down and the IP thereafter licensed out due to comments made by current WB CEO and his C-Suite team in light of recent movie and TV slashings that directly attack Death Cult darlings.
We are not out of this shit yet. Too many Normies still don't even know that indies exist, that BDs exist (outside of Europe), and--being Normies--will not go out of their way to find anything to replace the stuff they consistently complain about.
The Manga and Anime angle is being controlled via Sony. While there's complaints about pozzing, I think this is a strategy of containment; what they can't adulterate via control over Western audience access (Muh Localizations!), they choke off entirely and thus piracy--already recovering--will surge once more as the primary means for a lot of stuff to come West at all.
(For some, this means no change; they already pirate everything they read, watch, or play and buy merch via imports.)
This is a marketing problem.
That is itself a daunting realization. That's a game where scale is a multiplier and thus megacorporations have it a lot easier to market than indie actors. Combine this with not even pretending to be neutral intermediaries like YouTube, and you have a hell of a time putting your stuff before the eyeballs of Normies that may like it. They aren't going to go look for it, so you have to go to them and they stick in lanes dominated by the major media institutions- however unfit for purpose they are, they yet are and wield power as such.
Solve this problem and you'll break the dominant institution's hold over the minds of Normies.
