This is kinda a tradition now, where I do all the little observational posts I would normally write on Facebook, all at once, here, whenever I’m banned. (and I’m currently on my 12th 30 day!). So if you guys want to share this around over there out of spite, great.

A. The most important news of all, SERVANTS OF WAR is out now, and I’m gonna spam this one like my ammo budget depends on it.

B. We are going to do something kind of fun to promote SERVANTS OF WAR in a couple weeks. This will be kind of an experiment. I’ll talk about it here and Jack will talk about on the FB fan page when it gets closer. FB ruined Book Bombs, so this will be screwing around with other forms of social media to see what happens.

C. Okay, the big one. WW3. Last time I did an update post about this I said I’m not an expert on global geopolitics, and unlike most of the internet I’m not going to pretend to be one. And the only thing I know about military issues is how the contracts work and how to fix the DOD’s terrible spreadsheets. So, just personal opinion, while recognizing my strategic limitations so all the self anointed Von Clauswitzes don’t come yell at me AGAIN, real brief version… fuck Vladmir Putin. I’m rooting for the little guy and I hope the clock is ticking towards when some oligarchs get pissed off enough Putin “commits suicide” by thirty rounds of 5.45 to the back or drinks a polonium milkshake.

C2. By root for, I mean I think we should have a 4 for $10 Javelin missile blow out sale. We’ve got ATGMS! We’ve got Stingers! We’ve got bombs and more bombs! You’ve got Russians? NOT ANYMORE! Because at Crazy Lockeheeds, everything must go!

C3. By root for, what I don’t mean is that I’m going to be a hypocritical scumbag like Stephen King, and expect my countrymen to kill and die so I can proclaim my virtue because I Care So Hard. If you feel that strongly there’s a Ukranian Foreign Legion and they’re taking volunteers… Oh wait… No. He didn’t mean like that. He meant your sons need to “take those punches” (i.e. get shot or burned to death). Not him.

D. Now, what I do know something about is observing human nature in this country, and many people are dumb, gullible, and partisan enough that they’ll tend to believe whatever reinforces the narrative they want to believe. There’s also Neil DeGrasse Tyson syndrome, where being smart about one topic doesn’t make you smart on other topics. So they’ll make up some bullshit, and rather than adjust as more information comes out, they’ll die defending Bullshit Hill.

E. On propaganda and the fog of war. Duh. Of course it exists. Its always existed. Every side does it. The internet just makes it faster.
However all those “legends” the deboonkers are so smugly debunking… You kind of miss the point. That emotional manipulation exists for a reason, and its important. You just need to try and recognized when it is aimed at swaying YOU, rather than to motivate the people doing the fighting.

F. On that note, I wrote this on Twitter last night:
Some people – “You’ve got to recognize the propaganda war, man! Don’t get played!” Same people – “I’m gonna knee jerk react to anything George Soros is in favor of in a way that I come off sounding like a shill for a dictator during an invasion!”

F2. Look, I get it. When you find yourself on the same side of a debate as people you’ve seen be sleazy liars for years, it is going to make you question yourself. But even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes. If George Soros said hydration is good for you, you wouldn’t stop drinking water to spite him. The enemy of my enemy isn’t my friend. He’s just my enemy’s enemy.

G. Kinda related, but this is going back to domestic rather than international suckitude… Joe Biden is a drooling moron. Everything he touches turns to crap. Of course we don’t want that jackass leading us in a war. Don’t let vile progs shame you as a traitor. War sucks. War extra sucks when your leadership is a feckless imbecile and all the same generals who got butt fucked in Afghanistan are still running the show. When nobody got fired for that mess, that’s a clue they’re not going to rise to the occasion in the future.

H. So how about that State of the Union? The most positive thing I can say about it is that whoever is in charge of administering the pre-speech dementia drug/stimulant cocktail did a better than average job. Good work, team.

H2. Sure. We’re enabling a war by importing like 20% of our gas from a tyrannical douchebag, but GREEN ENERGY! (rainbows shoot from Joe’s hands and a unicorn flies by pooping free healthcare)

H3. Oh hey, NOW democrats are totally in favor of FUNDING the police. That whole massive spike in violent crime, totally not their fault. Now that rioting, looting, and burning cities isn’t helping them by holding voters hostage, democrats love them law and order again.

H4. Also, as the whole world is watching the exact kind of situation the 2nd Amendment was meant for, Ukraine is handing out AKs to anybody with a pulse, and Eric Swalwell’s “your AR-15 doesn’t do any good ’cause we can just nuke Nebraska” argument has once again been demonstrated to be the stupidest fucking thing ever, so obviously Joe Biden wants to push more gun control “because deer don’t wear Kevlar.” No. But you fuckers do.

H5. And finally, after years of calling half the country racist nazi hatemongers, and the “plague of the unvaccinated” didn’t die during “the winter of death and despair” NOW IS THE TIME FOR US TO SET ASIDE OUR DIFFERENCES AND COME TOGETHER. I swear these shitheads can’t help but channel an abusive trailer park husband. I’m sorry I hit you, but you deserved it.

H in Total. Well that was something. The SOTU was everything sucks, but its not our fault. Here are even more promises to fix the things we broke… I look forward to the midterms when you fucking scumbags take the worst loss in a century, get kicked out of office, and die penniless in a hobo camp.

Oh who am I kidding. None of these people will die penniless in a hobo camp. That’s what all that insider trading is for!

I. On that note, even the Democrat’s friendliest polls predict a bloodbath. We are now up to 31 democrat congressmen retiring (because they get to see the accurate polls) like rats fleeing a sinking ship. And its only going to get worse because the last year has demonstrated to even the squishiest of fence sitters that democrats simply suck ass and everything they believe is wrong.

J. That said I fully expect the Republicans to totally squander this. You can never go wrong assuming they will let you down. How badly they squander it will depend entirely upon how well everybody goes RINO hunting in their states this year. And this is the year to do it. I’d like to see the Great White RINO go extinct. (sadly, Mitt is safe this cycle, and he’s the greatest, whitest, hair gelliest RINO there is).

J2. Seriously, there is change in the air. The GOP can usually be counted on to suck and fail, but even there things are shifting. People are sick of this shit, and I’m seeing more and more Republicans turning into a party of regular, working, normal, sane people. People who could be on an episode of Dirty Jobs, pay their taxes, buy guns, don’t want their kids taught insane bullshit in school, and don’t give a shit what color you are. I’m sure this causes the Mitt Romneys of the world to shed salty tears of sadness at their hedge fund board meetings.

J3. On that one, mea culpa, Orange Man. I got you so wrong in 2016. I thought you were going to govern like a New York Democrat. That was the second biggest political misjudgment I’ve ever made (with #1 being that Mitt Romney wasn’t just a ziplock bag of hair gel in human shape).

K. In local news, you all saw that school letter I wrote. (and by you all, I mean half the country now apparently 🙂 ) I can’t go into too many details, but good stuff has happened. You all need to get involved in your local politics and do something. Anything. Step up. Get the word out. This is the year for decent people to push back.

L. Did I mention Servants of War is out? If you go buy it Steve won’t have to be an accountant anymore. Won’t somebody think of poor Steve in all this? Accounting is hard.

M. Since we are talking about writing, holy moly, Brandon Sanderson’s kickstarter. He made like $13 MILLION dollars IN ONE DAY, selling 4 books directly to his fans. Wow. Well freaking done. When it comes to author hustle and churn, that man is the GOAT. He’s one of the only guys out there who makes me feel like a slacker. Respect.

N. I’ve seen some authors get depressed or jealous over someone else’s success, or try to turn it into an indy vs. traditional thing. That’s just silly. (my old pal the Guardian’s Village Idiot is apparently SUPER BUTT HURT but that moron is just sad nobody recognizes his brilliance, and he’s better than everyone else, even though he doesn’t actually write anything) Don’t do that to yourself. If somebody else makes a dollar they didn’t take that dollar from you. The pie is infinite. I think it’s kinda awesome. (and also, Tor had better be kissing some ass today, because if he sticks around there it is only out of loyalty/pity).

O. Justin Trudeau is really super lucky WW3 rolled around to push his stupid doughy face out of the news cycle. Justin Trudeau makes Mitt Romney look like a vertebrate. What a scummy little wannabe tyrant.

P. But for Americans, the real lesson there is the tactics that dirt bag used against the people who stood up to him. In the old days they’d just kill you to shut you up. Now they freeze your bank accounts and make it so you can’t work or feed your family, until you comply. They take away your voice and your legal ability to push back, taking options off the table until only the worst apocalyptical options are left… and if you use those, then they’ve got an excuse to kill you.

P1. All of these effeminate little sneering leftists are one bad day away from being Pol Pot. All of them. Never forget that. Once they reveal who they are they need to be driven from office and never let anywhere near any sort of authority ever again. They will happily destroy you and everyone you love.

Q. Okay, that was getting dark… So new episodes of WriterDojo every Wednesday! (little happy shameless self promotion there). The show has been a lot of fun to do, and I’m glad you guys have been enjoying it (and hopefully getting something out of it!)

R. Book of Boba Fett… What the hell was that? That was possibly the single most inconsistent thing I’ve ever watched. I can’t really describe my reaction as a viewer, because it was all of them. Binging it is like – Good. Good. Okay. WTF? Bad. Weird. Good. Awesome. Awesome. Cool. WTF? Dumb. Dumb. Seriously, Disney, I now you guys are an evil mega corporation, but you are a RICH evil mega corporation. Get your shit together.

S. Just so you know being a writer doesn’t just ruin reading books for fun, it also makes watching TV harder, because when you watch something that should be good, but the writing decisions are just stupid, you end up sitting there thinking of all the ways you could have done it better. Just be aware of that before you jump in on this career field. Its why I like to paint minis while I listen to audiobooks or stream shows in the background. I’m way less judgey that way.

T. There will be more info coming about the MHI game. I’m not ignoring your questions, its just that was a teaser and on a bunch of those questions the guys actually making the game are going to have to answer them. I’m just the dude who makes up all the crazy monster stuff. 🙂

U. Thought of another one, sign up for the newsletter. It’s ONLY book and merch related stuff. So if you are one of those people who loves my books but hates my politics (yeah, they do exist, oddly enough) the newsletter is only upcoming products and updates. And we don’t spam you. I maybe do one a month if I remember.

Normally I try to make it all the way to Z, but SOTU and WW3 got a lot of addendums!

Some dumb idiot named Ryu 238 just posted this gem of a comment –

I find it interesting that Larry hates the free market and doesn’t give receipts for any “SJW harassment” he suffered, nor for any proof of his “success.

to this three year old blog post

https://monsterhunternation.com/2019/01/31/to-the-book-community-go-fuck-yourself-an-anti-apology/

This puts me at quite the quandary. Normally one stupid comment would be too small to get its own blog post but I’d share it to the group on FB, but I’m currently banned off Facebook, none of the audience is going to see it a few hundred comments down on a three year old blog post, and its just too damned goofily entertaining not to share with you guys. It is actually kind of fun to see somebody this out of touch, with zero understanding of the nature of the audience.

Okay, regular readers… first up. How much do I hate the “free market”?

Next… In the many years I’ve been doing this, and many of you have been following me here and on social media, how many examples of SJW harassment have you personally seen? Dozens? Hundreds?

And I’m a big fakey fake who has shown no signs of my success! This one is extra funny considering the last dumb commenter was complaining about how I was throwing my success in her face. Show of hands, who saw the Yard Moose Mountain project documentary pics?

I mean, I’m not Brandon Sanderson (holy shit that kickstarter is bonkers!) but I get by. 😀

This post is because I love you guys. Enjoy the stupid.

Servants of War is available now in hard cover and ebook. The Audible version is ready to download. I would say its available everywhere books are sold, but book stores that also sell healing crystals and new age feminist yoga candles tend not to stock my stuff. Go figure.

SERVANTS OF WAR

If you would like a copy autographed by both of us, you can get it here –

http://unclehugo.com/prod/ah-correia-larry.php

I am really proud of this one. Steve and I have been planning this story for a long time.

Please tell your friends and spread the word. I got banned on Facebook again last night so I can’t there (that’s my 12th 30 day!). That’s still where most of my fans congregate, so the timing on that is super convenient!

Monster Hunter International: the Miniatures Game 
“There are three kinds of people in the world: people who can’t believe anything, suckers who believe everything, and a few of us who can face the truth.”
― Larry Correia, Monster Hunter International

Monsters are real. Everything from myth, legend, and B-movies are out there, waiting in the shadows. Luckily for the ordinary folks out there, some people would face these creatures head-on. They are risking their lives to protect the world from the things that go bump in the night… For a paycheck, that is. They inhabit a world of werewolves, vampires, gargoyles, magic, and much much more. This is a world hidden from the untrained eye, known only to those who fight these creatures and those who have suffered at their hands.

     Monster Hunter International is a tabletop miniatures game based on the critically acclaimed novel Monster Hunter International written by Larry Correia. You play as monsters or hunters, bringing iconic characters and factions from the books to the table. Three different objective-based game modes, tactical decisions, and exciting combat offer endless replayability. Eliminating an enemy in “Blood and Puff” allows you to draw unique ability cards for your team. Control powerful artifacts in “Eldritch Power Mode” harnessing their power for dominance… without being corrupted in the process. Be the first team to capture a ghost in “Boo Who” bringing it back to base for extraction and victory.

    Collect all the highly detailed miniatures, each showcasing their unique base representing your favorite characters. Relive the pages from the books,  or write your own story when you and a friend battle one another. Secret dossiers on each team and character allow you to learn about them and get tips to use their abilities and gain the upper hand! Be the one to dominate your opponent in  Monster Hunter International.

Everything Epic Games, Founded in 2013, has launched over 22 Kickstarter Campaigns! Publisher of fan favorites such as Secrets of the Lost Tomb, Big Trouble in Little China the Game, Rambo the Board Game, The Librarians the Adventure Card Game, Upzone Pop-Up Terrain, and more! Everything Epic is excited to bring Monster Hunter International the Miniatures Game to Kickstarter this Spring 2022!

The following is the letter I sent to my local high school community council today. Here I have redacted all the names, and I don’t normally talk about my location online, but I did leave the school’s name because I want the locals to know what’s going on, and they know who everyone involved is. (to prevent confusion there are two Honors English teachers, the long time one who nobody has any complaints about, my older kids had her and loved her, and this newer one)

##

My son is in (redacted) Honors English class at Morgan High School (Utah). Recently her teaching methods have caused some controversy. As a professional writer I would like to address her curriculum—which appears to be far more about leftist indoctrination than English skills—and as a parent, the principal’s lackluster response to our voiced concerns.   

I became aware of this issue when I was approached by some other parents. They told me that the school’s response had been to “blow them off” as if they were too ignorant to understand what constituted effective English education. They asked if I would attend the parent’s meeting to add the perspective of someone who makes his living writing.

By way of introduction, I am a New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five novels, and three collections worth of short fiction. I’ve edited three anthologies. I’m published in multiple foreign languages, with several million copies in print, eBook, and audio. I have taught creative writing classes for dozens of events and for Weber State Continuing Education. I have been nominated for several prestigious literary awards and won a few of them.

That brief resume is to establish my credibility on this subject, but basically it boils down to the fact I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades learning how to write effectively, and more importantly, how readers process information. So I can say with absolute certainty that the methods Ms. (redacted) are using on our kids are awful. She isn’t just failing to teach them how to write, she’s teaching the antithesis of effective communication.

After I was approached by these parents, I asked my son about this class. To give you an idea how bad it is, (my son) told me that “it sucks”, he had learned absolutely nothing, but he was getting an A because he’s good at “telling the teacher whatever she wants to hear.” My son wasn’t learning any English skills at all, but rather how to play a political game.

I was appalled to hear that they would be spending the entire trimester on a single book, The Great Gatsby. Three months? I have nothing against The Great Gatsby, but to put this in perspective, it is only 47,000 words. My copy is 210 pages. The audio book is only 4 hours long. By novel standards it is extremely short. My smallest novel is more than double that, and my average is triple. Basically I’ve written longer books in less time than this class is being forced to analyze what’s basically a turgid novella.

It doesn’t matter how good a book is though, because tortuously analyzing any book for three months would make it awful.

You might be wondering, how in the world does an honors English class stretch out a tiny book for that long? Easy. You just talk about a bunch of contemporary political issues—which aren’t actually in the book—day after day, all from a biased leftist perspective.

You might think I am exaggerating for political effect. I’m not. My son was happy to show me some of his homework, and the assignments are simply absurd. Here’s an example.  

This is actually even more nefarious than it looks, because once you delve into each of those links, even the innocuous sounding ones are pushing a hard left perspective. Most of them are about how society is terrible somehow and you should feel bad for benefiting from it. None of these “lense” help the kids get better at writing or communicating. They are designed to squash dissent and force rigid conformity through public shaming.

What do I mean by that? It isn’t my story to tell, but one of the moms at the last parent’s meeting talked about how her daughter comes home in furious tears because she fails to live up to this teacher’s imposed ideal of feminism.

These “literary approaches” do not promote greater understanding of books. On the contrary they try to shoehorn in a bunch of political nonsense which isn’t in the actual work, and they fabricate messages the authors never intended. The kids aren’t learning to write. They are learning to “deconstruct” writing, which is totally backwards.

The number of readers in America is plummeting. People don’t read for fun like they used to, and why should that surprise us? Classes like this teach kids that reading should be a horrible, dreary slog, where you can’t just enjoy a work, you have to deconstruct it and look for all the secret symbolic meanings which are usually just a figment of some professors’ wishful thinking. Sometimes the curtains are just blue.

To demonstrate how nefarious this leftist propaganda masquerading as English education is, one of my son’s friends, (redacted), asked me to take a look at one of his homework assignments that (redacted) gave a zero. He believed his grade was politically motivated. After taking a look, I believe he’s absolutely correct.

The assignment was another of these deconstructionist nonsense things, where the student was expected to force a work into a proper leftist bucket based upon their feelings. They used a short Hemingway story, and (the student) looked at it through feminist lenses to explain why he felt the protagonist was a terrible person.

Professionally speaking, his sentence structure was clunky, and he couldn’t decide if he was going for colloquial voice or not, but it certainly wasn’t a zero. By the directions on the homework assignment, (the student) not only did it correctly, he also used one of the other encouraged lenses as well, by pointing out she was a vapid consumer with a pointless life, he accidentally used a Marxist deconstruction of the bourgeoise class. That’s nonsense, I know, but this whole thing is nonsense. The fact is this particular kid got zinged for not parroting the correct nonsense.

Meanwhile, my son just made up some crap about how the rain represented sadness and got an A. That’s great that he’s learning how to placate leftists, but I’d kind of like him to learn English in an English class.

None of this enables kids to write better. On the contrary, it creates mushy, indoctrinated, check box writing. Where rather than communicate ideas effectively and evocatively, they walk on eggshells, too afraid of violating some leftist shibboleth to actually come out and say what they mean. We see this in the real world every day, where any ideas which go against the prevailing cultural narrative are met with performative outrage.

That’s all I will say about the ineffectual nature of this politicized curriculum. The other parents have plenty of other examples to share, including male students being treated like garbage for being male, or kids getting up and walking out as they grew tired of the teacher’s tiresome use of “bitches”, or homework assignments being assigned late at night and expected to be turned in the next day (I believe the dismissive explanation for that last behavior was the unnecessary stress was supposed to prepare them for college, which is frankly asinine to anybody who has got a degree).

As for the school’s response, I’m unimpressed. I have now been to two meetings, one for parents, one community council, both of which are held at difficult times for anybody who works a normal job to attend, but even then there was a good-sized group at each.  I believe the first one had thirteen parents, and the one at 6:30 AM(!) today I saw many of the same faces.

Both meetings consisted of parents rattling off story after story about this one particular teacher, most of which hit the same consistent themes, and some fun new ones, like how she told the kids not to talk about her lessons with their parents. Gee whiz. I wonder why?

In the first meeting Principal (redacted) listened, and then tried to placate us by talking about the process of picking books and how some books are controversial. Here’s the thing. We don’t care about the intricacies of your bureaucracy or which novel you use. We care that the teacher then spends three months cramming social justice down their throats instead of learning about that novel. The book choice is almost irrelevant in that case. I bet (redacted) could vampire all the fun out of anything I wrote too!

However, that meeting did at least end with him promising to investigate.

Except then the written response to one parent’s officially filed complaint was dismissive and concentrated on the parents’ concerns which were brought up the least. There were a bunch of platitudes and academic speak that basically reads as, we just don’t see the big deal, sorry you parents are so worked up, but you don’t understand our brilliant procedures.

Fantastic. At this point I can see what the moms who first contacted me meant by “blown off”.

Then this morning’s community council meeting was interesting. Once again, parents voiced their concerns about this specific class, but were each allotted only two minutes to speak. Then the Principal spoke, and it was preposterous. He opened by reading us the dictionary definition of “discrimination” and then launched into a whole bunch of platitudes and circular logic, which was basically a thought terminating cliché about how the parents might be the real problem here, because by wanting English taught in our English classes instead of social justice, maybe we are enabling hate and genocide.

Yeah. He actually went there.

One of the moms is emailing me a recording of this so I can relisten to it, because it was so mushy it was hard to follow, but my initial reaction was anger. Nobody complained about “diversity”. There was no bigotry. In fact both meetings I’d been to the parents specifically said they had no issue with other points of view being respected, their issue was the biased, ham fisted, unfairness.

It is infuriating to see people do something horrible, and then hide behind the magic shield of “diversity” that excuses all failings. Even though this is a bunch of white folks in one of the whitest towns in America, lecturing the Azorean by way of North Africa, who grew up in one of the most impoverished and diverse places in the country, that because I want my kid to get educated rather than indoctrinated, I’m enabling genocide? I’ll be sure to tell my grandma the Polish Jew. How many rabbis do I need to get to tell you that excuse doesn’t make a lick of sense?

As far as I could parse, the excuse this morning was that she’s teaching “empathy” and everybody knows empathy is nice. Except that’s a big fat lie. First, it’s an English class, not an Empathy class. Second, why is empathy a one-way street, where only leftist approved views are the ones requiring all this understanding? And third, and most importantly, this nonsense doesn’t create empathy. It creates division and enmity. This stuff portrays a simplistic cartoon version of other human realities, filtered through the lens of liberal angst. Nobody appointed you guys Speaker For (insert minority group here).

This whole empathy schtick is tiresome. Oh no. The same political philosophy which runs most of publishing, Hollywood, the news media, academia, Big Tech, social media, the White House, and Congress, isn’t pervasive enough. Heaven forbid we don’t teach that exact same message our kids are force fed everywhere else in society in English class too.

He repeatedly brought up how teachers must be able to respond when students ask these hard questions about difficult topics. Great. Except I’ve yet to see any evidence the kids are the ones bringing this stuff up. Instead we are hearing our kids complain that she brings this stuff up constantly and beats them over the head with it. It certainly isn’t the kid’s questions that are writing up those homework assignments.

The really particularly galling part about all this is that in the name of “empathy” and “diversity” in order to stop genocide, they need to teach Marxist deconstruction… Marxism? The all-time reigning world champion of genocide? I know this is Social Justice English rather than Social Justice History but give me a break. In order to prevent genocide and truly understand The Great Gatsby it needs to be studied through the lens of the philosophy that gave us the Holodomor and the Killing Fields? Gulags and gas chambers?

Sure, as a writer I look through that sort of lens… When I’m writing the villains.

This kind of nefarious woke corruption of our academic institutions is nothing new. Most of us saw it when we went to college, but it has crept downstream since. What was 300-400 level university English deconstruction nonsense now gets crammed down their throats in high school. Which is why many kids going into college now no longer possess the basic composition skills we used to take for granted, because their high school classes were too busy searching for genderqueer Marxism instead. They can’t write coherently, but by golly they know Sam and Frodo were secret gay communists.

The best thing to come out of the last couple of years is that parents nationwide got to see just how horrid their schools had gotten. It was a wakeup call. Disgust at Critical Race Theory flipped the government of Virginia. The school board got recalled in San Francisco—the bluest big city in America—over this kind of thing. I keep seeing people thinking Utah is fine. Surely we don’t have that here. All is well in Zion!

It’s time for people to quit beating around the bush and be honest. Utah is “nice” in that as a culture we try to avoid contention, but in doing so we abdicate our responsibilities. Our tendency toward conflict avoidance might make us feel good about ourselves, but it is our kids who lose because of it. So I will spread the word about this to every MHS parent I can. If we need to escalate this through official channels and up the chain, great.

Because if we are forced to choose between our kids and your job security, the kids are going to win.

Sincerely,

Larry Correia