Reclaiming the Culture, One Weird Hill At a Time
Wargaming.
We don’t talk a lot about it here anymore. Not since I revived War In a Box and launched the best dang wargame channel on YouTube. But let’s go over my new focus a bit. Even those of you who aren’t interested in wargames might be interested to know where my focus has shifted, and why.
And, just to clear up one thing, tabletop RPGs are a subset of wargaming. Most analysis of wargames can be ported over to RPGs with very little effort. You roll your dice, you move your mice, you give your mice motivations beyond the rules themselves, and things quickly spiral out of your control.
My best selling novel reached (maybe) 200 people, with who knows how few of those were even read. Four years of dedicated effort barely moved the needle. I’m proud of the work I did and continue to work with a couple of publishers to produce more quality written content, and to provide an alternative to the cancer-ridden culture that predominates modern day publishing. But this have very much taken a back-burner to building something bigger and better.
We live in a post-literate world. Even readers spend a lot of time watching videos, and with one video I can reach several hundred people.
After just one year, I’ve found more than just several hundred fellow-travelers – for a lesser channel they might be called “fans” – and among them several men who have earned the rank actual friends. Good men who approach their games with the same affection and intelligence as myself, and among them, men who are starved for entertainment produced by a guy who doesn’t hold them in contempt and blame them for all the ills of the world.
It is early in this new endeavor, and the struggle to improve continues. My video style is unpolished compared to channels with bigger followings. The games I play are niche games with small but dedicated and underserved fans, which limits my growth. My opinions are strong, and my criticisms of weak play and modern culture are brash and unapologetic, though by necessity they are typically couched in the sort of coded cant, sarcasm, and oblique references lest I draw the vigilant and baleful eye of the Woke Patrol.
Still and all, it is a channel that is having some success. People are excited to be a part of it. They want to hear something different from the usual advice – something concrete and actionable and challenging. They want to be reminded of the prodigious amounts of good that their Western Civilizational heritage has done for the world. And sometimes they just want to roll those dice and forget all about the deluge of gayfake information streaming into their lives from every quarter.
The message is real.
It’s good. It’s beautiful. And it is true.
For those reasons alone it would be worth doing. Perhaps the money will follow and perhaps not. If it never does, that’s fine. It’s just nice to share a little something with my friends, and maybe remind a few people of blessed we are to have inherited such a wonderful little hobby.