Opera Singer. Franz Võlker Fan. Emerging Elitist. Ordinary Orthodox. Alliteration Advocate. Audio Engineer for Devon Eriksen's 🔥 Theft of Fire 🔥 ☦️
New York, USA
Joined June 2009
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Orbital Space: Box of Trouble is coming!
And It deserves a brand new mixing and mastering studio in which to work!
Couldn’t help but go all American in lighting today to celebrate one of the very best sci fi writers today: @Devon_Eriksen_ on the home stretch.
Box of Trouble is gonna SING!
Go Team 🔥 Theft of Fire 🔥
Free sample of first audiobook at DevonEriksen.com
Opera Rocks retweeted
this post has so much wisdom in it i thought naval wrote it
and i don't think the author even realizes why
if you understand this properly, you can explain almost all political issues we see in the world today
you can't take care of your loved ones if you can't even take care of yourself. you can't build a functioning country if your loved ones aren't taken care of. and you certainly can't save the world if your own country is falling apart. responsibility has to expand outwards.
the problem with so much left-wing thinking is that it's backwards. it starts with the most noble sounding objective imaginable, "saving the world" or "climate change" or "poor migrants", and thinks about the most nice-sounding solution, without considering if the conditions required to achieve it even exist, and that's why so many apparently well-intentioned policies end up doing the exact opposite of what they were supposed to achieve.
they sound compassionate, but completely ignore incentives, tradeoffs, or second-order consequences
clean your own damn bedroom and put your house in order before trying to change the world
you will never be able to fix the world if you can't even get the order of your own responsibilities right
Opera Rocks retweeted
A culture that stops giving the next generation King Arthur stories will unwittingly drive their children toward Anakin stories.
Demonizing the desire for order does not diminish the innate human desire for order.
Gen Z will root for Anakin over the chaos of spineless ineptitude and moral hypocrisy.
We must give them Arthur.
I lately heard that some people don't hear an inner voice when they read.
Mine...is very loud. Operatic even.
This is how my favorite author and ILM* @Devon_Eriksen_ sounds in my head.
Ok, ok, the music bed mighta been 10steps too far. But I had fun making it! I gotta do something while waiting for Box of Trouble, right?
*internet loud mouth, copyright pending.
There is an important reason that the right never wins the culture war overall, despite the left being so poor at tactics that they often end up shooting their own feet.
That is the reality that logistics are more important than tactics, and tactics only matter once you have sorted logistics out.
The left has sorted logistics out by creating patronage networks, while the right refuses to do so because it's still controlled by a curious kind of boomer paleoliberal who thinks that "free market" means "everything should pay for itself".
Thus, both the cultural and political struggles of the right must be waged by broke young men as a side project to their careers, while fighting for the left is a career.
The young men fighting for the right are simply expected to purchase their own rifles, ammunition, uniforms and kit, provide their own transport to the front, then organize themselves into units to defeat the communists.
If you understand this, then you will understand why the retards manage to win a lot despite being retards.
The left is giving people 100K fellowships for writing lesbian novels, while the right is charging its own guys $200 to listen to some theoretical ramblings about the antichrist.
No, that's not a metaphor. I wish I had made either of those two facts up as some sort of hyperbole.
Only the left understands how to get and use political power.
The left understands that power is a form of currency. So if you want it, you have to buy it, with some other form of currency. Such as money.
The right thinks that political power is a side effect... something that you naturally accumulate while doing business.
Possibly this is because most wealthy right-wing people are investors. They start a project, or put money into it, and they expect to get their money back and then some. That's what they are used to.
That's how investment works.
But that's not how power works.
And if you have wealth, but no power, then the people with power will just take whatever you built.
I don't know exactly what the tech right, the business right, the wealthy right, should be spending on political power. But what they are spending is clearly not enough and in the wrong places.
Because George Soros sure as hell isn't selling people tickets to listen to him talk.
Opera Rocks retweeted
Truth is, the AI film scene is industry now.
and like every industry before it, the first thing it ate was its own promise.
The promise was beautiful and meant something. no gatekeepers. no permission. no rich uncle, no film school, no crew of a 100, no producer deciding your story wasn’t “marketable.” just you, an idea and a machine that didn’t care who your father was. for a moment the gates were open, and everyone walked through
They didn’t like that.
It started with the industry moving in. Deals with CapCut. Partnerships. Then, almost overnight, Hollywood directors who had spent years calling it the death of cinema were slowly, reluctantly writing cheques for it. That could have been a good thing. Money, legitimacy, a bridge between two worlds.
But they didn’t come alone. They brought the old ways with them.
Suddenly there were festivals. Then fees to enter the festivals. Then their selected people on the list of juries, “Official selections.” Laurels on posters. Which on people should be good. But with it the gatekeeping. And trust me its there behind the scenes they have their blacklists.
See early access is the new nepotism. Follower count is the new budget. That's why those in those circles started buying their followers to up their follow count btw. Being in the right group chat is the new being born in the right city. The same names win the same prizes and thank the same tools, and when you think a new name wins you find that its someone tied to industry.
The industry has been here for a bit now. It doesn't mean industry = bad. But the nepotism and gatekeeping came with it. And you'll start noticing it yourself as time goes on why its just more of the same exclusionary old ways that ruined Hollywood.
So if you feel like its rigged. That's because it is. They'll tell you blue in the face it isnt. Well then just look at who is sponsoring them.
Still time to build your own table. Own your work, your audience, your name. Publish where nobody needs your gratitude. Make the strange film, the ugly film, the one that wins no laurels and fits no challenge. Make the thing they’ll copy next year and pretend they thought of first.
Opera Rocks retweeted
I hate to be this cynical, but I’ll be honest…running for Mayor exposes you to things that make you believe the city is actually being overtaken by demonic energy. Drive south Fig at night. Go to 6th and San Pedro. You see children openly prostituting, drug zombies setting dogs and cats on fire, babies born to crackheads and tossed in a dumpster, dead people just lying in the streets…that’s not even to mention the dozen neighbors of ours who burned alive in what is now a crumbled hellscape.
Many times I wondered if the city’s problems weren’t beyond the reach of any politician’s capacity to actually fix. There is a cultural and spiritual rot that can’t be fixed at the ballot box. Until we fix the culture, we are kinda just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and the shit we shovel around every 4 years doesn’t really mean a thing.
I am not kidding about the demons in LA btw.
My best friend works at McDonald’s and some dude tried getting her to be his sugar baby while she was handing him his order in the drive thru.
My other friend was on a film set and one of the actors tried getting him to be in her p0rno outta nowhere while he was helping her down a hill.
And I was acting in a film where I learned one of the stuntmen was invited to this house and they were trying to get him into a cult while doing a bunch of demonic rituals.
Bunch of unclothed men in bed. No clothes at all. He immediately left.
Not to mention I’ve been followed and attacked by drug addicts. I know people who were almost killed.
DONT COME TO LA. DONT DO IT.
Opera Rocks retweeted
In free nations, we investigate crimes to see who is guilty of them.
In communist tyrannies, they investigate men to see what they can be punished for.
Opera Rocks retweeted
Writing process: brutal, awful, like eating shards of glass while the ghosts of your ancestors tell you how much they hate you.
Results: Better than ToF.
My week in a nutshell. Yesterday I passed off “trained monkey tedious bullshit busy work” of track placement, bussing and indexing data (not to mention error triple checking!!!) that the week before took me 8hrs…in 15min with a prompt and a template in place. All I “get” to do is show up now and create my mix.
Where the eff is this all going.!?Right now it feels like magic. Alchemy is happening before our eyes. Bizarre.
Opera Rocks retweeted
Apparently Scott Greer - and numerous other conservative "influencers," "podcasters" and other assorted fauna - need this explained to them: fanfiction is the garden in which potential writers first cultivate their talents.
Fiction writing is an incredibly difficult art to master; which is why the average age of debut novelists is 35, and the average age of an author releasing their first best-seller is around 50. It requires intellect, life experience, well-honed technical mastery, and the ability to hold an entire world in one's head, complete with a full cast of imaginary friends that have lengthy conversations with one another. Jumping feet-first into the deep end is effectively impossible; which is why the vast majority of writers start with fan-fiction - even many "original" works are just filing the serial numbers off something else and leaning heavily on genre conventions. It allows the nascent writer to develop their skills in an otherwise stable framework; affords them an opportunity to crawl before they walk.
The "Malfoid" phenomena stands out because Harry Potter is the first long piece of fiction (seven books!) that an entire generation read in young adulthood, and perhaps the last work of fiction that achieved nigh-universal readership among an entire generational cohort. For that same cohort, having a story written (or re-written) *for them* is like tasting chocolate for the first time in thirty years, given the publishing industry has been, like so many other institutions, completely captured by the DEI left and has relentlessly purged white male authors from its ranks; leaving what few remain struggling to rise above the churning ocean of half-assed trash that chokes Amazon self-pub.
That you and so many other "conservative influencers" knee-jerk response is to sneer at this development reveals a thunderous and damning ignorance on your part of something the left understands innately - the power of narratives. As @Devon_Eriksen_ has explained before, narratives are fundamental to how we mentally model the world. Motives and desires, emotions and reactions, even basic physical cause-and-effect requires a narrative; even if it's as simple as "if I push on this door hard enough, I can open it, and get at the grain that's in the tack room." My goats have figured out that much; which is why they break into the tack room daily even if they can't see the grain, or even the bag that usually has grain in it through the wire mesh.
Because of this, narratives are incredibly powerful influences on our thinking - and this is precisely why the left wing is utterly obsessed with controlling every narrative they can get their hands on. It's why they go well out of their way to hunt down anyone in the arts with even the slightest conservative thought and drive them out by any means necessary. Its why they take pains to fill elementary school libraries with sordid books explaining masturbation techniques - they understand that narratives are how children learn almost everything they know of the world; and why so much of their attempts at "serious" art are about as sophisticated as aesop's fables for left-wing values: they absolutely view it as a tool for controlling minds. If you doubt the deliberate intent behold the majority of what they produce, look no further than the coercion California's state government applied to video game giant Blizzard and the results thereof - video games are the one major media form leftists don't have a total stranglehold on, and they're trying to change that.
And *why* do leftists have total control of film *and* the publishing industry? In large part thanks to people like you. People who see the first licks of flame among folks who might not have read any fiction in years, drawn in by fond familiarity and a re-write promising a *very* conservative kind of tale; of the power of herteronormative love and good overcoming evil - and promptly unzip and piss all over it. People who can't tell the difference between the synopsis I just gave and 200 pages of lesbian romance featuring a Donut Steele self-insert mary sue. People who can watch normies, desperate for a good story that isn't more DEI wankfest slop, organically pursuing something similar to what leftists do via cold calculation when they infest a previously-great franchise, gut it, and wear it like a skinsuit, but can't appreciate the downstream political implications of that. People who can't grasp that the average normie doesn't want to read your 187 IQ political essay, but just want some honest-to-god entertainment. People who actually think "This is John Gault speaking" is the best part of Atlas Shrugged and wish the rest of the story hadn't been wrapped around it.
I suspect people like you are not ensouled. You have no sense of wonder; no imagination, no ability to lose yourself in a great story. You never stayed up as a child reading under the covers with a flashlight well after your bedtime; transported by the tale. And so you cannot recognize that quality when you see it; can neither understand how "kiddie stuff" can contain it, nor recognize true art in its larval form. And indeed, this would dovetail well with how podcasters and influencers act in general; not true believers in anything they say, but grifters, who've figured out that the stupid screaming rubes want their biases confirmed and all you need to do is push the button to make more money come out of the 'chute; viz. Tucker Carlson.
And above all, what you can't understand is that good art is, by and large, conservative. Because conservatives write stories, not aesops; they concern themselves with human characters and thus care about the truth of humans' character, rather than treating truth as a blank slate that can be filled with any arbitrary lie desired, and wiped clean and re-written on the spot as desired. People like you seem to think that "conservative" art is a character stopping, turning to the camera, and saying "women's rights," except maybe it's "gun control bad."
This borderline-sociopathic lack of empathy leaves you unable to grasp fiction at its most basic level; you might think the classics are important because something something conservative values something something basis of western civilization, or because that one dude sounded real convincing playing a mafioso, but nothing more. And so you sneer out the side of your mouth at creators; confident that you're the Big Serious Adult having Big Thinky Thonks on your podcast, while the youth that will be voting in three years are glued to whatever they can find on Netflix and having that beamed straight into their cerebellums.
Art is a vehicle for thought, and most art is not War and Peace by dint of the basics of supply and demand - it takes a year to write a *good* novel and a day to read it. But because it's not Serious enough for you, you cede that ground to the collectivists, willingly, and merrily piss on anyone inspired to change that.
Stay in your lane, Scott.
Opera Rocks retweeted
In my last two threads, I explained how communists have always taken power, what DataRepublican just uncovered, and how to counter it. Today I have one message, and it's for Donald Trump: be very careful.
The most dangerous part of their plan isn't what they will do. It's what they want you to do.
According to the files, the strategy is to generate clash after clash in the streets until the president invokes the Insurrection Act. That is the red line. The moment it's crossed, they declare the federal government illegitimate and shift legitimacy to the governors who refuse federal troops. Read that again. The trigger is your response. The trap is built so that defending order becomes the proof of tyranny.
This is the oldest move in the revolutionary playbook. Provoke the state, film the reaction, and turn the reaction into the justification. Revolutionaries have always needed the government to overreact at the right moment, in front of the right cameras. They have already written the script. The only role left to cast is yours.
So, Mr. President, don't give them the image they need. Don't fight on the battlefield they chose. Fight on yours.
Your battlefield is daylight. Publish every dollar of public money that flowed to these networks, every grant, every sub-grant, every intermediary, and let the American people see it with their own eyes.
Your battlefield is the law. Hold public hearings under oath while you still hold Congress. Enforce the laws already on the books, through the courts, calmly and relentlessly. Prepare the constitutional response to rogue governors now, so nothing has to be improvised in a crisis. Those who improvise under pressure make the mistakes their enemies were waiting for.
Your battlefield is technology. Give citizens open AI tools to trace their tax dollars and map these networks themselves. DataRepublican did it almost alone. Imagine a hundred million Americans doing it. A nomenklatura survives through opacity, and AI is the end of opacity.
And your battlefield is November 3. Every vote is a vote on whether an elected government gets to stay legitimate.
Their plan needs two things: chaos and a strongman to blame for it. Give them neither. Give them transparency and the Constitution, applied without flinching. Nothing destroys a network that lives in the dark like daylight. Nothing destroys a legitimacy campaign like a government that stays scrupulously within the law.
The stakes could not be higher. If the United States falls to collectivism at the very moment superintelligence arrives, there is no fallback, no other country able to rebuild the free world. Western civilization would be lost for good.
You have the institutions, the facts and the
Constitution.
Don't let them write the ending.
🤖 Made with AI
🚨 🚨🚨 I think we're living through a civilizational turning point. And most people haven't realized it yet. 🚨🚨🚨
We keep hearing that the globalist project is collapsing. It isn't. It's alive and well in the European Union, where Brussels keeps marching on as if nothing happened. And in the United States, it didn't die. It mutated.
If you want to see what that mutation looks like, read what DataRepublican just published. According to the audio and the thousands of documents she scraped, a network of former USAID and State Department officials, organized under a group called Renew to Thrive, is working on what they call "the day after tomorrow": what a rewritten American government should look like.
And they're not alone. She reports that this group sits inside a much larger, extremely discreet umbrella, the United Democracy Alliance, which coordinates the major "resistance" NGOs: when protests get deployed, on what timeline, how to respond. Operationalized, according to her, by an organization of 1,600 former military, intelligence and diplomatic officials.
The most chilling part: they've reportedly drafted a list of "red lines" past which the elected federal government should be declared illegitimate. The one they discuss most is invoking the Insurrection Act. And the mechanism doesn't even require governors to sign anything. They just have to refuse federal troops in their state and let the network do the rest.
Senator Mike Lee said he was speechless. Elon replied with one word: "Troubling."
Understand this: for these people, it isn't politics anymore. It's survival. They lost power at the ballot box, so they're building the machinery to contest the very legitimacy of the people who won. Their influence, their networks, their money, their impunity, everything they've built over decades depends on getting back in. So they're going all in.
And this fight is happening at the most decisive moment in human history: the arrival of superintelligence.
Whoever controls the state when AI surpasses humans won't just win an election. They'll win the century.
I only see two scenarios.
Scenario one: the Democrats take back power. Remember what Elon said in 2024: "If he loses, I'm f*cked. How long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?" Everyone laughed. Read those documents again and tell me he was joking. If a movement that pre-writes the criteria for declaring an elected government illegitimate comes back to power, there's a very strong chance Elon gets persecuted. Him, X, and everyone who dared to speak up.
And the world that follows is 1984 with GPUs. A hyper-class owning all the means of production: AI, robots, data, energy. The rest of humanity locked into a form of techno-feudal slavery, on a drip, surveilled, docile. Communism always promised equality and delivered a nomenklatura. With AI, the nomenklatura won't even need the people anymore.
Scenario two: Elon wins with the Republicans. And this deathly project gets dismantled. Not reformed, not slowed down. Dismantled. Every network, every unelected structure, brought into the light. And we finally do what history never had the courage to do: the Nuremberg of communism. The great moral and historical trial of an ideology that killed tens of millions of people and is still trying to sneak back in through the back door.
There is no third way. No lukewarm scenario. The coming decade will decide.
Pick your side while you still have the right to.
Opera Rocks retweeted
Absolutely stunning essay by @DouglasKMurray about the crisis in France. It includes this quote.
thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-f…
Opera Rocks retweeted
Kaylub Giamanco is an armed civilian who ran into lethal danger to save the lives of others. He didn't just react to what came at him, he recognized a general threat and went after it.
Many people want to call him a hero. I do not, because using that label is implicitly an excuse for cowardice by others.
Giamanco did his duty as a man, an American, and a member of what is still described in federal law as the unorganized militia. We will have a healthy culture again when every American man knows he is expected to do the same.
If you call this heroism, then every man must be a hero at need. Only in this way can civilization be maintained.
Opera Rocks retweeted
I pre-ordered the audiobook ages ago and then kept forgetting to listen once it finally came because at what point do I ever open BookFunnel? (Mediocre app, btw; doesn’t pause when Siri interrupts, which I would think is a basic API skill issue)
Christine, I finally started listening, and I’m having a great time. Reading Theft of Fire (Orbital Space book one) (am I doing this right)
Soft release of my production studios new website incoming.
Do me a favor and go to kuduproductions.com and give honest feedback here on format and effectiveness of your experience. Fluffing not necessary.
(I did it in 2 days back and forth with Claude voice mode).
Thanks for your feedback.
Developing taste is the only thing left.
Read a book. Read @Devon_Eriksen_ Theft of Fire.
I said it, didn't I?
I predicted this exact thing, and I explained why.
I said that AI art is slop not because the art is bad, but because it lacks a detailed mental model of the audience and what they want.
And I said that AI art would cease to slop the moment it was controllable enough to faithfully implement a human's artistic vision.
Well, here we are.
This is AI as the paintbrush, not the artist.
This is the future of stories. Power. Precision. Insight. The hybrid of machine and man.
Some people say we're going to democratize Hollywood. But they are wrong. We are going to liberate it.
Because democracy is when you need the permission of a million suburban soccer moms to build a power plant.
Liberty is when you can just do things.
Well dayum. This makes my panties moist. Thank you for the props, @Devon_Eriksen_ I’m putting this on my new website!
@CDoombeard and I have lots of shiney Claude AI toys to show u for Box of Trouble post. As we work on Dave Freer’s Storm Dragon we’ve invested a ton of time in automating the mind-numbing time suck that is editing audio. What used to be a 6:1 ratio in PFH may very well be down to 1.5:1 in the coming weeks! Stay tuned.
To answer @StephenFleming , it’s always gonna take a team of very nimble minds to pull off a Devon Eriksen production. I’m learning in my current work the freedom that ai brings only invites more complexity creatively. And that always invites more cooks into the kitchen.
While I know a thing or two about stories, I am not an expert in film and visual media. I will either have to learn things about using the camera to tell a story, or take on a co-director who is experienced in this.
As for the rest, there will definitely be a team. One of things I learned very quickly about audiobooks is that the more bandwidth a medium has, the more specialties it requires.
I already have the sound nailed down. @CDoombeard, @tiny0nion and @toss_across are perfect for their roles. @Opera_Rocks somehow manages to have top notch technical skills and top notch artistic sensibilities... left and right brain both.
I might have to bring on one more person to help him with sound effects, and a composer.
Then the core of the visuals would be wrapped around a couple of really great animators.
I envision heavy use of AI tooling, rather than fully generative AI. While I admire what people are doing with it solo, especially the example above, I don't think that approach will provide the level of control I want in order to make it conform to my particular artistic vision.
So, more of a hybrid approach, with a kickstarter-generated budget and a small team. I view the audiobooks as training for this kind of project management.