Pixel Scroll 4/4/17 I Used To Be A Filer Like You, But Then I Took A Pixel In The Knee

(1) CATAPOSTROPHE. New Mexico fan Jack Speer’s relentless habit of correcting others’ fanwriting earned him the nickname “Grammar West of the Pecos.” Sounds like they’ve found his soul-mate in England — “’Banksy of punctuation’ puts full stop to bad grammar in Bristol”.

BBC tracks down self-styled ‘grammar vigilante’ on mission to rid city of rogue apostrophes

…He told the BBC he was a family man who worked in engineering. “I’m a grammar vigilante,” he said. “I do think it’s a cause worth pursuing.”

The man said he began by scratching out an extraneous apostrophe on a sign but had since become more sophisticated and has built an “apostrophiser” – a long-handled piece of kit that allows him to reach up to shop signs to add in, or cover up, offending punctuation marks. “This is a device that enables you to plant an apostrophe quite high up and get over any obstacles,” he said.

(2) PACK YOUR BOOKS. For years there have been stories that TOR will move out of the Flatiron Building and a new report from a real estate blog makes it sound like it could happen. Really. Maybe.

Another one of the book business’s “Big 5” publishers is seeking a new chapter in Lower Manhattan. Macmillan Publishers, the sole office tenant at the landmarked Flatiron Building, is weighing a move to Silverstein Properties’Equitable Life Building at 120 Broadway, sources tell The Real Deal.

…If the deal goes through, it would be the first time the Flatiron Building, owned by Sorgente Group of America, would be completely empty since it was built more than 100 years ago. Part of the reason Macmillan is relocating is the fact that the Flatiron District, the area named for the 22-story building, has become the epicenter of the city’s technology industry, driving up rents.

Sorgente could either lease the building to higher-paying tenants, or follow through on a plan it previously considered to convert it into a hotel.

(3) BOOK RECS WANTED. James Davis Nicoll will soon be writing two milestone reviews and is looking for book recommendations.

I have two notable reviews coming up for my Because My Tears Are Delicious To You reviews: the 150th one and the third anniversary one. Tears reviews are of books I read and liked as a teenager (between 1974 and 1981). I welcome suggestions for candidate books.

(4) JACK WILLIAMSON LECTURESHIP. The 41st Annual Jack Williamson Lectureship will be given by Melinda Snodgrass on April 7 at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales.

The 41st Annual Jack Williamson Lectureship, with events April 7, 2017, welcomes author and friend of the Lectureship, Melinda M. Snodgrass, with special guest author Michael Cassutt, and writers, friends and fans from across the region for this annual celebration of Jack Williamson and the genre to which he contributed so significantly.

This year’s theme is Wild Cards! – the shared universe anthologies by some of the best writers in science fiction, edited by George R.R. Martin and Melinda Snodgrass. First released in 1987, the series published its 23rd volume in 2016. Adapted to role-playing games and comics, the Wild Cards series is now slated for television by Universal Cable Production (UCP), executive producer Melinda Snodgrass, with SyFy Films’ Gregory Noveck….

(5) PREHISTORIC COMIC CON. At Galactic Journey, The Traveler ingeniously makes his visit to last weekend’s Wondercon look like it happened in 1962.

(6) BLACK HOLE BIRTHDAY PARTY. “Massive explosion from unknown source billions of light years away baffles astronomers” starts out as a news item, then delves deep into black holes. As so much news does these days….

This enabled a distance to the burst to be measured: about 12 billion light years. The universe has expanded to four times the size it was then, 12 billion years ago, the time it took the light to reach Earth.

GRB170202 was so far away, even its host galaxy was not visible, just darkness. Because the GRB was a transient, never to be seen again, it is like turning on a light in a dark room (the host galaxy) and trying to record the detail in the room before the light goes out.

Mystery of gamma ray burst

The flash of gamma radiation and subsequent optical transient is the telltale signature of a black hole birth from the cataclysmic collapse of a star. Such events are rare and require some special circumstances, including a very massive star up to tens of solar masses (the mass of our Sun) rotating rapidly with a strong magnetic field….

(7) ON TRACK. Yahoo!’s story “Cyborgs at work: employees getting implanted with microchips” comes from Stockholm.

The syringe slides in between the thumb and index finger. Then, with a click, a microchip is injected in the employee’s hand. Another “cyborg” is created.

What could pass for a dystopian vision of the workplace is almost routine at the Swedish startup hub Epicenter. The company offers to implant its workers and startup members with microchips the size of grains of rice that function as swipe cards: to open doors, operate printers, or buy smoothies with a wave of the hand.

The injections have become so popular that workers at Epicenter hold parties for those willing to get implanted.

(8) COMPETING NARRATIVES. David Gerrold ended his overview of the 2017 Hugo finalists with these comments:

My seat-of-the-pants analysis (I could be wrong) is that the Hugos are in the process of recovering from the 2015 assault, precisely because the Worldcon attendees and supporters see themselves as a community.

There’s a thought buried in that above paragraph — that communities unite to protect themselves when they perceive they are under attack. This works well when the attack is real, such as Pearl Harbor. But it can also have negative effects when hate-mongers such as Bryan Fischer and Pat Robertson (both of whom were in fine form this week) invent a scapegoat (LGBT people) for unwarranted attacks in an attempt to unite the community around their own agendas.

So while those who have a long history of participation in Worldcons will see this unity as a good thing — those who identify themselves as the aggrieved outsiders will see it as more evidence that the establishment is shutting them out.

Myself, I see it as a collision of two narratives — one that is based on 75 years of mostly healthy traditions, and one that is based on a fascist perception of how the world works.

Most important, however, is that most of this year’s ballot suggests that we are seeing a return to the previous traditions of nominations based on excellence. Most of the nominations are well-deserved, and my congratulations to the finalists.

(9) GLEE. The Book Smugglers were pleased with their Best Semiprozine nomination and that’s not all —

Now, the best thing about this year’s Hugos? Is that it feels GREAT to be a part of it again – it’s super easy to get excited and happy about the ballot with so many great people and works on it and with what seems to be like an almost canine-free ballot. We can’t wait to spend the next few months squeeing and discussing and agonising over who to vote for. Seriously, check out that Best Novel list – some of our favourites of 2016 are there!!

(10) NO WEISSKOPF. A lot of Finns are happy with the Hugo ballot. Not this one. Declan Finn covered the announcement: “Newsflash: Hugo Awards Swamped by Crap”.

Six nominees for best editor. See anything missing?

I’ll give you a hint: we were all told that This Person would have almost certainly have won the Hugo award for best editor, but she lost because she was a Puppy Pick.

If you said, “Who is Toni Weisskopf, Alex?” you’d be right.

But strangely enough, Toni isn’t here. But she’s not a Puppy Pick this year. We were all told that she would have won if she weren’t a Puppy Pick.

Guess what: she wouldn’t have even been NOMINATED if she weren’t a Puppy Pick.

They lied. Shocking, isn’t it?

He also did not approve of the Best Series finalists. Or anything else, really, except for Jeffro Johnson and the Castalia House blog.

(11) SCHADENFREUDE. Jon del Arroz is thrilled by the substantial dropoff in nominating ballots since a year ago.

Of course, in recent years, they’ve been telling anyone who’s a conservative or Christian that they’re not real fans, and not welcome at their conventions, certainly never allowed to speak.  And so the Sad Puppies were born, and had a good run for a few years before once again, just like their projecting meme, the establishment behind the Hugos said “these are not real fans” and changed the rules to make it impossible for anyone but their chosen to get noticed.

The Puppies pulled out. I promised you numbers, and here’s what we have.

Best Novel: 2,078 ballots in 2017 vs. 3,695 ballots in 2016, a 44% drop.

Best Novella:  1,410 ballots in 2017 vs. 2,416 ballots in 2016, a 42% drop.

Best Novelette: 1,097 ballots in 2017 vs. 1,975 ballots in 2016, a 45% drop.

Best Short Story: 1,275 ballots in 2017 vs. 2,451 ballots in 2016, a 52% drop.

I can keep going on with the numbers here, but that kind of pull out of an audience is staggering. If this were a TV show or a comic, it would be instantly cancelled. The execs would be using this as a case study as to what went wrong and why so that they could never do it again. Kinda like is beginning to happen in comics right now (but they’re still in the denial stage of grief).

You’re seeing about a thousand less votes across the board per category. That means a thousand less people with memberships than last year. Wow. Note to “real science fiction fandom”: you told about half your audience you hate them and you want them to go away. They did. This spells big trouble for you in the future.

(12) FROM A RETIREE. The world is filled with people who are pleased to pass along any piece of news they know will annoy the recipient. Larry Correia has a friend like that, and the upshot was “Don’t Forget to Nominate for the Dragon Awards”.

The reason for this post was that a friend of mine sent me a PM this morning, that they had announced the Hugo nominations, and gave me a link. Being retired from trying to cure Puppy Related Sadness, I only gave the list a brief cursory glance, saw the names of many proper goodthinkers, and counted like a dozen(+) nominations for Tor, so it appears that balance has been restored to their sainted halls of Trufans enjoying themselves in the proper approved manner. I’m sure many wooden buttholes will be sacrificed upon the altar of Social Justice.

(13) EYES RIGHT. The Castalia House blog had not posted an acknowledgement of its Best Fanzine nomination when I looked. They were just doing business as usual, showing how they earned that nomination with their two latest posts, “The Most Overrated Novel of the 20th Century by Alex Stump” (about Frank Herbert’s Dune) and “How Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Frank Miller Ruined Comics by Jon Del Arroz”.

(14) ON TOUR IN CLEVELAND. John Scalzi tweeted about the ballot several times. He may have been overlooked for awards, but there was good news about his latest novel.

And as Jerry Pournelle often says, “Money will get you through times of no Hugos better than Hugos will get you through times of no money.”

(15) STILL FLYING. Harrison Ford keeps license, escapes fine for piloting error after an FAA investigation into his taxiway landing:

After actor Harrison Ford landed his small plane on a taxiway, rather than a runway, at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, Calif., in February, the Federal Aviation Administration began looking into the incident….

The Federal Aviation Administration determined at the conclusion of its inquiry that “no administrative or enforcement action was warranted,” Ford’s lawyer, Stephen Hofer said in a statement. “Mr. Ford retains his pilot’s certificate without restriction.”

The actor, who played swashbuckling space smuggler and Millennium Falcon pilot Han Solo in the “Star Wars” film franchise, also was cited by the agency for his “long history of compliance” with FAA regulations and “his cooperative attitude during the investigation,” Hofer said.

Although Ford incurred no penalty, he agreed to undergo voluntary “airman counseling” before the FAA closed the matter, his lawyer said.

(The BBC used a more colorful metaphor: No fines for Ford for being a ‘schmuck’)

(16) WHAT IF THEY CHEAT BETTER? Web inventor slams US, UK attacks on net privacy.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee was speaking to the BBC following the news that he has been given the Turing Award.

It is sometimes known as the Nobel Prize of computing.

Sir Tim said moves to undermine encryption would be a “bad idea” and represent a massive security breach.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd has said there should be no safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online. But Sir Tim said giving the authorities a key to unlock coded messages would have serious consequences.

“Now I know that if you’re trying to catch terrorists it’s really tempting to demand to be able to break all that encryption but if you break that encryption then guess what – so could other people and guess what – they may end up getting better at it than you are,” he said.

(17) WHAT IF THEY CHEAT A LOT BETTER? It depends on how much those cheaters have prospered. These guys made a lot: “Overwatch ‘cheat maker’ told to pay $8.6m to Blizzard”.

“The Bossland hacks destroy the integrity of the Blizzard games, thereby alienating and frustrating legitimate players and diverting revenue from Blizzard to defendants,” the US games developer had argued.

The tools included the ability to see other players’ positions, health scores and other information from a distance within games.

The Zwickau-based firm’s managing director said it did not accept the US court had jurisdiction over it, and that the judgement did not take into account that many of the licences it had sold had been “trials” at a fraction of the normal cost.

“We are discussing with our lawyers how to continue – if an appeal to the declined motion to dismiss is worth trying,” Zwetan Letschew told the BBC.

Bossland’s website remains active and continues to advertise cheats for several Blizzard games, insisting “botting is not against any law”.

(18) A WIZ OF A WIZ HE IS. “Ian McKellen Explains Why He Refused to Play Dumbledore in Harry Potter” at io9.

Anyway, McKellen is in good spirits about the whole thing. When host Stephen Sackur asked, “You mean you could have been Dumbledore?” McKellen responded, “Well sometimes, sometimes when I see the posters of [Harris’ eventual replacement] Mike Gambon, the actor who gloriously plays Dumbledore, I think sometimes it is me.”

(19) INVENTORY READY TO GO. I foolishly wasted my time writing news posts when I could have been preparing to monetize my nomination!

And The Mary Sue is so excited they turned the Hugo Award announcement into a Chuck Tingle promo with three of his book covers for art.  Love of money is real!

[Thanks to Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, Mark-kitteh, JJ, Andrew Porter, Chip Hitchcock, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Greg Hullender.]

150 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/4/17 I Used To Be A Filer Like You, But Then I Took A Pixel In The Knee

  1. JJ, on continuing to read a book that you aren’t connecting with, I use the 100 rule. You subtract your age from 100 and read that many pages. If you don’t like it by then, set it aside and move on.

  2. Congratulations to most of the nominees!

    The kerning on “A W A R D N O M I N A T I O N” on Dr. Tingle’s cover is just painful.

  3. I have yet to meet a grimdark story I like. Might happen someday. I’m not holding my breath.

    For awhile I was trying not to reread so much, but then 2016 sucked and most of early-2017 also sucked and whoops I’d reread most of my favourite books and also obsessively reread Astolat’s Witcher fanfics a dozen times. Possibly more. So now I let myself pick what makes me happy, but try and remind myself that new stuff makes me happy too.

    I wonder if some of last year’s newbie nominators ended up feeling a little put-off when the Puppies essentially invalidated most of them. I know I felt a little deflated, although I did nominate this year as well. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling to put in my first ever nominations, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and have them mean very little because the Puppies decided that their political agenda made it okay for them to run roughshod over ordinary new-to-Worldcon fans like me.

    @stuckinhistory

    Welcome!

    I really don’t understand how the Puppies can continue to claim to represent Christians in fandom. Plenty of us both on File770 and elsewhere have informed them in no uncertain terms that we’re against their slates and we’re not part of their group. (As a rule I dislike declaring my religion, but the Puppies spent so much time telling us that we were all anti-Christian devil-heathens that I felt I had to be part of the group pushing back on it.)

    Count me as a now second-time nominator (and 28 year old) Worldcon noob who was deeply irritated at being told that the Puppy campaigns are for “ordinary fans” like me.

  4. @Galactic Journey

    Congrats Rocket Stack Rank! You’re popular for a reason. May this be a good year for you in Finland!

    Thanks! It it helps more people get into reading short fiction, we’ll count it as a win, no matter what the final ballot is.

  5. Oh, this is priceless. Declan Finn has now written a post in which he claims to rebut the comments of “The 770 Trolls” (I guess we’re trolls because we had the audacity to point out his genre ignorance?).

    Except that of course, he doesn’t link to this thread, and he completely fails to rebut any of the numerous valid points made by Filers (with the exception of the claim that the Honor Harrington series was not eligible for Best Series, which is somehow really, really important to contradict) — including the real reasons why Weisskopf wasn’t nominated for Best Editor, which bear no resemblance to his claimed reasons. (Apparently we were supposed to vote for her because she’s a woman, and Our SJW Rules, according to him, say that we’re obligated to vote for women.)

    He also thinks that Filers made disparaging remarks about Goodkind because “his bad guys resembled Jihadists or communists”, instead of because Goodkind’s books are extruded Tolkien-like fantasy product.

    Hilariously, he thinks Worldcon voters haven’t noticed that VD’s minions couldn’t be arsed to pony up membership fees this year in order to nominate and vote on their Dark Overlord’s slate. Seriously. He apparently hasn’t read the dozens of Filer comments pointing out that very fact.

    He also says (because he apparently represents multitudes) “No one gives a flying f*** about your crap anymore. I mean, no one cares anymore. Larry, Brad, Vox, everybody has stopped caring.” as if he actually thinks that the opinions of Larry, Brad, VD, and Finn have some meaning for Worldcon voters.

    It’s one thing for him to put his genre ignorance on full display in his earlier post. But it’s sort of bizarre that he would want to display more of it in yet another post.

  6. Declan Finn sure says a lot about something he doesn’t give a crap about doesn’t he?

  7. I remember Terry Goodkin as a bad Jordan-copy, filled to the brim with message fiction.

  8. I’ve only read the first Terry Goodkind book and I don’t recall any messaging. The problem I had with it was that as I was reading it, I’d decided it was generic fantasy product aimed at younger readers but meh – fine, then it went all S&M, and that wasn’t really what I wanted or expected.

  9. Going back to Finn’s first Hugo post, I don’t know why he expects Ghostbusters to win. I certainly don’t. I didn’t even nominate it. I thought it was okay, and I loved Kate McKinnon, but to me, Arrival and Hidden Figures were the superior films. But of course, he’s just got to flog that ‘pew pew female remake’ one more time, I guess.

    And if Mr Beale no longer thinks the Hugos are worth trolling (or, rather, he bows to the inevitability of 5/6 and EPH), well, as someone else said, don’t let the door hit ya where Cthulhu split ya.

  10. Catholic here. Choir member even. Also probably qualify as a crazy cat lady since I’m up to 4 SJW credentials.

  11. Anne Sheller: I’m up to 4 SJW credentials.

    Wow, there is some serious Social Justicing going on at your house. 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈

  12. Bonnie McDaniel: I don’t know why he expects Ghostbusters to win.

    It’s those SJW Rules which the Puppies have invented, which say that we’re obligated to vote for things written by, edited by, or starring women.

    I never got that memo (probably because VD would be on my Blocked Senders list). Ghostbusters will either be 4th or 5th on my ballot, once I’ve hopefully had a chance to check out Stranger Things.

  13. rob_matic:

    “I’ve only read the first Terry Goodkind book and I don’t recall any messaging. “

    You get a lot of it in later books.

  14. If we’re declaring these things. Lapsed Baptist. GF is a lapsed Catholic. We have 2 SJW credentials each and hope to be combining them in a single household by the end if the year.

  15. Atheist. Only one SJW credential, but will be an extra in end of May. Yesterday, my SJW credential jumped out through a window he managed to open and I had to wait until midnight to get him back. That is when he sat outside my window, meowing something about abandoning him in the rain.

  16. @ rob_matic: You got a lot further than I did. I read the first chapter of the first book standing in front of the bookrack at my college bookstore (which tells you how long ago that was) and said, “Tolkien did this a lot better,” and never bothered looking at it again.

    @ Bonnie: I’ll certainly vote Ghostbusters ahead of No Award. But there’s no way my top pick is going to anything but Arrival this year.

    @ Anne: Piker. We have 9 at the moment, but there are several that we’d like to re-home if we could find the right person.

  17. You subtract your age from 100 and read that many pages. If you don’t like it by then, set it aside and move on.

    Past the age of 100, though, you’re going to risk getting put off by bad copyright pages.

  18. Raised Methodist originally, haven’t really identified as any flavour of Christian since my age was in single digits, stopped attending church except for “special services” (Easter, Christmas) when I was 12 or 13. Haven’t formally attended church since I went to university. I’ve been in churches, cathedrals, temples etc since but largely not in a religious capacity. I think the last time I took part in something religious was shockingly recently, actually – I prayed at a Buddhist temple with my girlfriend, atop a mountain (well, a bloody big hill) in South Korea, on New Year.

  19. I was raised Methodist but am no longer particularly religious. When I lived in the UK, I didn’t give it much thought, but now that I’m settled in a majority Muslim country, I’m much more aware of this part of my background in terms of identity and values. The secular/religious divide is very significant here, and the religious minorities do get a raw deal. I’m not sure what will happen if we raise children here.

  20. I enjoyed the two series of the Sword of Truth series than I did the one (first) novel that I read. I found that first Goodkind at about the time that I decided that I wanted more than Extruded Fantasy Product in my epic fantasy.

  21. Raised Southern Baptist, deconverted as the result of a mandatory “History of the Old and New Testaments” class at the private religious high school I attended. No SJW credential, due to allergies.

    As for the “Ghostbusters because womyn” argument, Finn appears oblivious to the fact that Arrival is totally about a woman’s decision to have a child, Hidden Figures is about black women being the key to white guys going to space, and Rogue One (which I finally got to watch!) is about a woman reconnecting with her father and finding something to believe in. But sure, Ghostbusters is the obvious “because women” winner. #doublefacepalmalltheway

    I wonder what he thought of the International Women’s Day bit in Deadpool

  22. It’s those SJW Rules which the Puppies have invented, which say that we’re obligated to vote for things written by, edited by, or starring women.

    The Pups and their fellow-travelers always come off like they have never actually interacted with humans in any meaningful way.

  23. I’d ask the twits in 770s comments section to think that over, but that would require that they think in the first place.

    When you read a line like this and realize Finn has brought his rhetorical A-game to this fight, I don’t know that we can win. HE’D ASK US TO THINK BUT WE’D HAVE TO THINK. Do you see what he did there? Masterful. I’m reminded of the time at Mark Twain Elementary School in 1974 a classmate imperiously informed me that he knew I am, but what is he? I could only stare in bafflement in lieu of a response.

  24. Cradle Episcopalian here. *Fistbumps Lis*

    And as far as my SJW credentials…um…I’m more of a dog person. Sorry. Does this mean I have to leave? I kind of like it here….

  25. We do not think, therefore we do not exist. As non-entities we drift through the universe, trying to find a host we can take form in.

  26. I do not own a SJW credential, the apartment I live in will not allow SJW credentials. I can only and rarely (this IS Minnesota) visit other people’s SJW credentials. I grew up with SJW credentials, though.

  27. I’d ask the twits in 770s comments section to think that over, but that would require that they think in the first place.

    I’ve thought about it, and come to the conclusion that a couple of non-entities “not caring” about the Hugos is of no consequence to me. Yes, I just called Larry, Brad and Teddy non-entities. Because they are. They are mewling nothings sitting on the fringes of genre fiction desperate for the approval of people they profess to hate. Beale is even more of a non-entity than Brad or Larry, sitting on the fringe of the fringe.

    Here’s a question that I’ve been pondering: If Baen’s authors are all selling huge numbers of books and nobody buys books written by Tor’s authors, why is it that Tor has five to ten times the annual revenue that Baen does? How is it that Baen as a whole is continuously outperformed by Tor? To hear guys like Finn tell it, all of the successful authors are in Baen’s stable, but that never actually seems to translate to increased success for Barn as a whole. Why is that?

  28. Aaron, because it’s a CONSPIRACY, of course.

    Never mind that they think the Free Market is the final arbiter of quality….

  29. Hampus:

    Unfortunately, Dr. Mrs. Rob (1) is allergic to the traditional SJW credentials, and (2) doesn’t much like dogs. So I’m afraid we’re going to be petless for the duration.

  30. Practicing Anglican here (I’ll get it right one day, if I practice long enough) and owner of 2 SJW credentials. I adored Ghostbusters for many reasons, but I wouldn’t put it top of my ballot. That goes to either Arrival or Hidden Figures, but I suspect I’ll be wobbling on which one until the day voting closes.

  31. Im happy to read that Im not the only one who was bored to death by Terry Goodkind.

  32. Aaron, because it’s a CONSPIRACY, of course.

    Well, yes, there’s that. The conspiracy dollars from the conspiracy are what keeps Tor awash in money.

    The other thing that is funny about all of the Finn’s of the world is how they are convinced that Worldcon is going to suffer irreparable financial harm because they are turning their backs on the convention and the Hugos. Apparently the fact that Worldcon was a successful going concern before they showed up and the Hugos had built themselves into a prestigious award without their help is lost on these guys. Here’s a clue: Worldcon will be just fine without them. The Hugos will be fine without them.

    Meanwhile, they make a big fuss about not caring about the Hugos while spilling lots of pixels on their blogs about them, which makes it seem like they care about them quite a bit. I don’t care about the Dragon Awards. The way I demonstrate this is by not writing blog posts about the Dragon Awards. When the Dragon Awards are written up in Forbes, I might start caring about them.

  33. JJ: Hilariously, he thinks Worldcon voters haven’t noticed that VD’s minions couldn’t be arsed to pony up membership fees this year in order to nominate and vote on their Dark Overlord’s slate. Seriously. He apparently hasn’t read the dozens of Filer comments pointing out that very fact.

    Really, people are making this too complicated. VD told his readers who didn’t already have Hugo voting rights not to join this year. So they didn’t. That doesn’t rule out him asking them to next year, if he finds a use for their votes.

    JJ:It’s one thing for him to put his genre ignorance on full display in his earlier post. But it’s sort of bizarre that he would want to display more of it in yet another post.

    It’s practically impossible for a blogger to resist the temptation to repeat doing anything that has gotten attention the first time. Just ask me….

  34. (10) I lost track long ago (to be honest, I never kept count) of the number of times *Puppies have made the Weisskopf Complaint and been told
    1) She refused to list a single work she’d edited, claiming in fact that all the editors at Baen are equally responsible for every book, making it impossible to judge her quality as an editor.
    2) The Best Editor, Long Form category is a controversial category, with many members annually No Awarding it or just not voting at all.

    I have never seen any evidence that a single *Puppy has absorbed that information.

    (13) The Dune review reminds me a lot of Jeffro and his “I’m an expert in the SFF field who hasn’t actually read much SFF in the past, but am doing so now, and here are my expert opinions about these classic novels I just read” thing. That, and some of the more egregious “Young People Read SF” reviews (no offense to the young people reading the SF, and I also have those reactions at times when reading a classic for the first time – I just don’t take it to mean that SFF has been going downhill since God the whole creating the heavens and the earth story).

    Regarding the Dramatic Long Form noms – the usual suspects will be able to spin this one nicely, it seems, unless Deadpool wins, as (it seems to me, from those I’ve seen and what I’ve heard of those I haven’t) every other nominee passes the Bechdel test.

  35. RE Finn’s declaration that Correia, Torgersen, and Beale don’t care about the Hugos… Well, no. Of course they don’t. Is there someone who thought they did?

    In fact, from the beginning, let alone now, my take was that none of them cared about the Hugos. Because I don’t think anyone who cares about the Hugos would treat them the way these guys treated them from the start of the whole Puppy mess.

    Larry Correia launched and perpetuated the Puppies by treating the Hugos as a political football. He consistently talked about the Hugo in terms of how much he wanted to stick it to writers, fans and publishing professionals who are more liberal than he is. IMO, that is the position of someone who never cared about the Hugo Award.

    Brad Torgersen took that strategy (so to speak) even further in 2015, launching his Hugo campaign with a blog essay in which he dissed years of Hugo winners, nominees, voters, and volunteers, and he spent the rest of his campaign persistently framing the Hugos as a conservatives-v-liberals playing field.

    These are not the behaviors of people who ever cared about the Hugos in the first place, so I have no trouble at all accepting Finn’s assertion that they don’t care about them now, either.

    As for Beale, he was candid from the start, and multiple times thereafter, about not caring at all about the Hugos. He specified he just wanted to destroy them (all because John Scalzi made a fool of Beale on the Nielsen Haydens blog a decade earlier, and his tender feeling were still smarting over that). Does Finn think Filers irrationally believe that Beale has suddenly STARTED caring about the Hugos after several years of baldly admitting he doesn’t?

    Whether or not anyone else in the Puppy clique cares about the Hugos, the Sad Puppies seems to have evaporated this year, and the Rabids seem to have dwindled down to just a few pajama people glued to Beale’s daily blog. One hopes that Beale will lose interest entirely now that the new procedures prevent him from being particularly disruptive to a fair nominations process anymore. Less disruption equals less attention, and attention seems to be his primary goal in all of his tiresome antics.

  36. P.S. IIRC, there were highly vocal Puppies who were so disengaged from the Hugos in reality (but deeply invested in fighting over them) that they kept mistakenly thinking the Hugos were SFWA awards or managed by SFWA.

  37. I’ve always felt that Jeffro Johnson’s greatest crime was to write about H.P. Lovecraft and somehow make it boring. I’ve read a lot of Lovecraft criticism, from the work S.T. Joshi to the Houllebuecq monograph and the commentary by China Mieville and all of it was fascinating. The new Age of Lovecraft collection was fantastic, and I’m probably going to follow up on some of its sources. Whether I agreed with these sources or not, they added something to my reading of Lovecraft. Johnson’s material was deadly dull because it added nothing to my reading process, providing no additional historical background, no formal or generic engagement with the text, just a summary with a commentary that attempted to connect Lovecraft to a project that really had nothing to do with his work.

  38. My revisions unfortunately were disappeared because I took too long. What I was going to add, was that I think that this is a problem with the entire series that got nominated for the Hugo, and that I would actually like to see someone really take up the project that Johnson proposed and really work through the materials influence on the aesthetics of D&D, rather than Johnson’s polemic against contemporary sff works. The really poor review of Dune reminded me of this, which has a lot of similar problems.

  39. @Laura Resnick:

    Long time no see! I was just recommending the Esther Diamond books to a friend last week.

  40. @Robert Wood: You have effectively summed up everything about Jeffro that there is to say. His writing is dull, adds nothing of value to any topic he is writing about, and does so in an overwhelmingly arrogant manner. He is going below “No Award” on my ballot. If one could vote for someone to be “Double-Plus No Award”, I’d put him there,

  41. @Robert Wood – I had the same reaction to both Jeffro’s “Appendix N” book report anthology and that recent Dune review. You summed it up much better than I did. It’s a slap in the face to read an essay on an artist you love only to find out the author knows almost nothing about said artist and is also wildly swinging a club at a straw figure that you suspect he thinks represents you.

  42. I’ll play. Jew-ish, lost my SJW credential in January, considering getting a new one and naming it Ser Pounce but not ready yet.

    Mike Glyer on April 6, 2017 at 9:53 am said:

    It’s practically impossible for a blogger to resist the temptation to repeat doing anything that has gotten attention the first time. Just ask me….

    For the love of the gods don’t go into the hospital again. We don’t need more Shoggoths.

  43. Iphinome: For the love of the gods don’t go into the hospital again.

    Some means of attention-getting are much less tempting than others, I assure you.

  44. Late to the thread, but can’t resist:

    @Cassy B & @Varoius: Jumping back to @Cassy B’s comment on page 2. Excellent comment! I’d like to add:

    Something else baffling, occuring to me as I read your comment, is that everyone is new to one at some point. So whoever Finn likes to read – that person was a new author to him the first time he enounctered them. So how on earth does he pretend to claim that not hearing about someone, they must not be any good?! I mean, what the ever-loving F, dude! Look at your own life and reading history – that makes zero sense. Negative sense!

    @JJ: “over 1,300 books” – Eek, I’m too afraid to count. ::runs away in terror::

  45. @Iphinome: how can you name a cat in the abstract? You might get one that outright fetches as in the recent video, or one that just goes “meh” at bouncy toys, jingly balls, laser pointers, …. (I’ve been custodian to one of each; currently 0 as we’re trying to think how to find a hole-filler for a very sociable credential. And I’m an ex-Episcopalian (not lapsed, I threw it aside with great force) ex-atheist semi-militant agnostic (as in, don’t get me started on (inter alia) the convent attached to the Cathedral of St. John the Unfinished.)

  46. “Long time no see! I was just recommending the Esther Diamond books to a friend last week.”

    Hey Rev Bob,

    Glad to hear it! And if I may be excused a brief plug, Graphic Audio is now producing the Esther Diamond books as full-cast audiobooks, complete with sound effects and background music. In all honesty, I’m love what the team at Graphic is doing with these books and am extremely happy with the results. 🙂

    http://www.graphicaudio.net/our-productions/series/esther-diamond.html

  47. I suspect Finn’s objection is not ‘I’ve never heard of them, so they’re no good’, but ‘I’ve never heard of them, so they can’t represent the consensus of Real Fans’. If Hugo voters were doing their (alleged) job, of representing everyone who reads science fiction, their choices would be works so famous that no one could have failed to hear of them

    (Which makes it a bit odd that I have not heard of one of Finn’s choices.)

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