438 thoughts on “A Holiday Weekend With Comments 9/3

  1. John A Arkansawyer:

    “Back in 2003, when some of us were depressed by the low quality of the anti-war leadership, I decided to take the Darth Cheney point of view of, “You fight a war with the opposition you have.””

    Well, I have been an active member of the peace movement for 25-30 years now. The real depression were the people who didn’t care about the US policy of genocide against Iraq until 2003 when americans also started to die. And that is when you could see the real quality of the peace movement, people struggling against all odds to lift the murderous sanctions.

    Reading what Paul has written and is writing, I find it a lost cause to engage with her. She answers all civil discourse with attacks and name calling. Lets remember that theirs is a fringe group of the alt-right. They aren’t movers and makers.

  2. Kendall: JJ, where’s my bribe to toe your line??? Paypal will do nicely, thanks.

    The check is in the mail. I am sure that you can expect it to arrive any day now. I mailed it at the same time as Mike’s bench plaque. *cough*sorryhaventgotaroundtoityet*cough*

  3. Paul Weimer (@princejvstin) on September 4, 2016 at 7:23 pm said:
    @jonesnori. off the top of my head, there is child murder (very early on), and slavery, and some really dark things involved with both of those. Oh, and an apocalypse and the problems with people acting badly during the same.

    Aaron on September 4, 2016 at 7:43 pm said:
    @jonesnori: Child murder, violence against children, rape. slavery, and nonconsensual sex that isn’t quite rape (I’m not sure how to describe this – it isn’t rape, but neither party really wants to participate).

    Oh, dear.

    Well, I am really glad for Nora, but I can’t read those. I get nightmares from scenes like that.

    Thank you both for the warnings. *sigh*

  4. Hey, thanks everyone for the kind words and thoughts.

    Stupid feelings. Who invented those?

    One of the great things about the SJW credentials: while they have significant empathy (the one by my pillow was totally hanging out there because I was sad), it only goes so far. After a very nice nap, I was roused by head-butting. “Hey, human, we’re sorry you’re sad, but it is Time To Feed Your Cats.”

    @Bonnie McDaniel:

    Also…as much as I loved The Obelisk Gate, perhaps it isn’t the best book to be reading at a time like this.

    No, actually it’s great. I’m already invested in the story and the characters, the world-building is top-notch, the writing is clear and direct enough that I don’t find myself re-reading the same half-page over and over again, and I am prepared for any potential punches in the face or feels. And if one of those metaphorical punches lands, I know that it’s deliberate and serves a narrative or thematic purpose instead of being unintentional or cheap artificial stakes-building.

    (Again, my three favourite anime are Haibane Renmei, Kino’s Journey, and Madoka Magica. Each of which had me watching the final episode with a hand over my mouth and/or tears streaming down my face. (Nested parenthetical! Rot-13 spoiler for Haibane Renmei, content warning for mention of suicide: Gurer jnf n cbvag jurer V yvgrenyyl fubhgrq ng gur fperra, “bu zl tbq, pna’g lbh frr gung fur’f qevivat lbh njnl fb fur pna xvyy urefrys?!?”) Honourable mention goes to Fruits Basket, even though the anime was only part of the story. The manga is alllll about how parents fuck up their kids. Waterworks central.)

    Tomorrow involves more phone calls and feelings, but for tonight at least I can rest relatively easy knowing that dad’s being monitored by professionals and in the best place he can be if something happens.

  5. Dawn Incognito, I’m sorry to hear about your dad’s setback, but am glad that he’s getting the best care possible. Hang in there. My SJW credentials send cuddles (and, of course, sass) to you.

  6. @junego: Have your son contact Bonnie Burton at CNET, this is right up her alley.

    @Petrea: Same here. My folks called in a panic, but we didn’t lose power, even. Everyone I knew lived in the East or South Bay and were “Wow, that was somethin’.” The worse story I heard was from an acquaintance who got stuck in the Transbay Tube for less than an hour till BART started up again, and that was just annoying.

    @Kevin: Exactly. In Chicago one year for Worldcon (so that doesn’t narrow it down much), I said “Geez, all this unreinforced masonry” and the Midwesterners laughed “oh, you silly Californian, we don’t have earthquakes!” and I said “New Madrid.” Half of them were “New what-now?” and the other half got very quiet.

    @PJ Evans: cheers to Frisbie for the remark. And besides tornadoes and blizzards, we also get the possibility of tsunami — a number of boats and docks were damaged after the Japanese wave got this far. We just don’t have them all.the.time (and the blizzards and tsunami are easy to avoid), so mostly we suffer through the lovely weather, fresh food, and cultural diversity. I had no idea there was a 5.6 off the coast the other day. Meh. 64 miles is too far away. Hardly anyone noticed.

    @Rick Moen: But the USGS “Did you feel it?” section does use Mercalli scale! Color-coded and all. So their maps do show it.
    Everyone accepted back in the 60’s that if you pump fluids into deep wells, you’ll get earthquakes. But Nixon signed the EPA into law too; things were different.

    @Cora: I had the “Sad Whelkfins” essay in my BRW list. Also a website about the history of filk. Both more related to the genre than the puppy poo.

    If I never see another Harley Quinn, Joker, or Deadpool costume, it will be too soon. There were a TON of them at SVCC. There are so many excellent comic book characters equally as recognizable, why restrict yourself to just the overdone ones? I loved the person in the Minion costume (who was given a Ba-Na-Na), and the guy who was dressed up as “Captain Canada”, with maple leaf on his shield instead of star (I got that reference!). Also approved of the Jessica Jones/Luke Cage duo. Hope to see more Wonder Woman next year.

    Regarding “Fifth Season”: Climate change is WHOA NELLY SUPER REAL in that world, thanks to geologic change. It’s also a world in which people also can control the shaking of the ground thanks to special organs in their brain, and big-ass obelisks float around mysteriously. This is not our world, and during Fifth Seasons, survival of the fittest comes in — and the whole planet are preppers; you’d think pups would like that. The only racial superiority is if you have the poofy ashblow hair that keeps volcanic ash and dust off you, which only comes in handy when there’s a Season. The evil people are of both genders. And all the characters are so vivid.

    I wonder if the Dragon Awards will be properly promoted next year? Like, bothering to list them on their web page? Will they still let any email address whatsoever vote? (Except me) Or will they do the sensible thing and restrict it to DragonCon members? (Nah, too much like work) I think it’d be fun to see some other segments of the DCon fanbase get organized, so the ballot has slates for All Things Cumberbatch, K-dramas, Jessica Jones and Orphan Black, Harry Potter, etc.

  7. @JJ:

    Actually, no, Kurt probably reached that judgment the same way I did — by having read enough of her words over at MGC. One need not attribute anything to her personally other than her own past words about the Hugo Awards to come up with a judgment of hypocrisy.

    Not meaning to sound critical, but you referred me to the SciFi4Me interview to understand what you meant upthread, so I listened to all 17+ minutes and transcribed most of it, and now you say she’s a hypocrite/dishonest because of things she said at MGC? Foregoing is not intended as rhetoric; I’m seriously trying to find what you guys are referring to. (You’d be right if you suspected that I don’t normally spend time on MGC, either, so I probably wouldn’t have seen more than a few things there over the last year.)

    And it’s not “an uncharitable interpretation”. It’s what she said — that passing EPH and 3SV and EPH+ was likely to “damage the Hugo brand”, as she reiterated later on MGC:

    OK, I’m possibly being dumb as a post about this, but wherein lies the hypocrisy (and/or dishonesty)? Is there something that rules out Paulk sincerely holding a conviction (if one frelling well unsupported by facts and reasonable inferences such as ones made by thee and me ;-> ) that the then-pending electoral proposals would hurt the Hugos?

    I mean, that’s a debatable question on which people do hold opposing views, which is why we of WSFS, y’know, debated it. Ben Yalow thinks EPH is bad, too, but I don’t call him hypocritical or dishonest for it.

    Are you calling her a hypocrite (/dishonest) on grounds of only pretending, in your view, to care about the Hugo ‘brand’? I ask partly because that wasn’t apparent in the SciFi4Me interview. She said there that ‘if [anti-slate measures] go through, a number of people will actually turn their focus away from the Hugos, will decide that the Hugos are dead, the Hugos are no longer for me, and look to somewhere else that is more willing to accept other people’s input.’ You could call that a precursor of one or more melodramatic flouncing off, but I can’t see what would make it hypocritical or dishonest.

    I had a good laugh over the ‘working with the WSFS committee behind the scenes’ bit, too, but again, delusional it would seem, but not clearly dishonest/hypocritical AFAIK.

  8. Rick Moen: Are you calling her a hypocrite (/dishonest) on grounds of only pretending, in your view, to care about the Hugo ‘brand’?

    I’m calling her a hypocrite on that, because she’s spent at least a couple of years now, horrendously bashing and bad-mouthing and lying about the Hugo Awards, the Administrators, and the members of Worldcon, and actively participating in and promoting attempts to damage the Hugo Awards by rigging them. And now she claims to care about the Hugo Awards’ reputation and integrity? Really?

    I’ve requested a copy of the transcript from you, and will be happy to post my comments relating to the things she says after I’ve gone through it.

  9. @lurkertype: [Loma Prieta story]

    I was in downtown Berkeley at the time, doing a network-consulting job at National Center for Science Education. Getting home to S.F. thus entailed a five-hour delay w/detour through Marin County, for bridge-outage reasons. Some of my fiancee’s pottery work had fallen and smashed; no other casualties except my sweetie’s peace of mind: She seriously wanted to decamp to her home town of Kiryat Shmona where she’d have nothing worse than Scuds to worry about. (Moral: Risk assessment is what you make of it.)

  10. @JJ: Sent (and to one other gentleman who so requested). Have to apologise for the stretches that I elided and paraphrased, but… er… I found the interview a bit short of inspiring, and was looking for specific things relevant to upthread. Anyway, if I’d known of interest in an accurate transcript, I’d have gotten all of it verbatim instead of just the bits that seemed most relevant to prior discussion.

  11. Okay… thanks very much to Rick for his transcription of the SciFi4Me interview with Kate Paulk.

    He’s asked me to be specific about what I say is lies and hypocrisy on Paulk’s part. So I went back through the first half of the interview, and edited the transcription pretty closely, so that I could be specific. (Sorry, by halfway through, I was so nauseated at the disingenousness that I couldn’t continue with the detailed transcription.)

    Here’s the transcription. I will follow up with my comments.
    —————————————————–
    0:00
    [about 2 minutes of the interviewer making it clear that he hasn’t bothered to do his homework and doesn’t actually have any idea what’s been going on, and is just repeating some talking points that Paulk said to him before the taping started]

    1:55
    Paulk: Um… it was more… everybody who has been involved in the Sad Puppies campaigns… has tried to make them as open as we can, but all of us have full-time jobs, or we write full-time in Larry Correia’s case, we are not by nature politicians. We are simply fans who are… and writers who are very concerned at seeing the… well, frankly, dismal participation figures, and seeing that… librarians don’t consider the Hugo Awards to be even relevant when it comes to deciding what books they are going to stock in their libraries, because people… in general, the wider world, don’t really care… they don’t see the Hugo Award-winner as meaning, “Oh this will be a good read”, they seem to be seeing it lately as “Oh, this is going to be boring.” And, you know, awards that people like Asimov, and Heinlein… and some of the many, many other greats of science fiction have won over the years, should not dwindle to a kind of irrelevant, pat-each-other-on-the-back thing.

    Interviewer: Right.

    3:30
    Paulk: And so… we’ve tried in our own ways to make things more open – the method I chose was one, after observing both the flak that people caught – that Brad and Larry caught – and the sheer nastiness directed at them and at others, in some cases, simply because they happened to be mentioned favorably…

    Interviewer: Right.

    3:57
    Paulk: … after seeing that, I thought, “Okay, I will do this, but I will do it in a way that makes it impossible for someone to claim I’m being biased, I am slating, I am trying to harm things… because really what we… what will in any of those accusations, is having… instead of it being being a celebration that… Oh my gosh, we’ve had over 5,000 nomination votes, given that we are talking the premiere award for science fiction, and how popular science fiction movies, and games, and anime, and manga, and all those other things have become, given the mega-best-sellers like the Harry Potter series, like the Twilight books – which are – which were in their publication years eligible, Worldcon attendances should be five figures and higher.

    Interviewer: Oh, sure, they should be…

    5:03
    Paulk: They have been around fi– they’ve been doing well to sc— to get 5,000 paid attendance.

    Interviewer: Right.

    5:10
    Paulk: Worldcon voting numbers should be very much in the five figures, in the tens of thousands. And they are not. When you have fewer than ten thousand voters, when you can guarantee a finalist slot with fewer than fifty people who will follow your voting lead, that’s not good for the award, it’s not good for the genre. So, the Embiggening was to try and boost that. I was delighted to find that the number of nomination ballots cast came close to doubling over the last year. So, the whole point has been to try and push for more participation. I don’t really care who ends up winning. Because if there’s more participation, there’s more interest in the award, there’s more interest in the convention, there’s more interest in the genre.

    6:07 [clueless interviewer stumbles around a question about slates]
    Interviewer: Now, if – if – if… you look at… the very specific… uh… uh… literal definition of “slate”…

    Paulk: Yes.

    6:18
    Interviewer: uh… because that word gets thrown around a LOT.

    Paulk: Oh, yes.

    6:22
    Interviewer: uh… it’s… the idea of a slate – the slate is a list of options, a list of choices.

    Paulk: Yes.

    6:29
    Interviewer: And that’s basically what the ballot is… the ballot is a slate of nominees…

    Paulk: Absolutely.

    6:35
    Interviewer: And… you know, John Scalzi has his list of recommendations, Steve Davidson has a list of recommendations, you guys have a list of recommendations… how – how is it… that… the, the idea of a… of a list of recommended titles, how did that become a slate in a negative, pejorative way, do you think?

    6:59
    Paulk: Um, I think there is a very small but very loud and quite influential clique that had thought that they had a lock on quietly arranging things in the background. If you take a look at the history of nominations, and the history of finalists, for, say, the five to ten years leading up to – probably Sad Puppies 2 would be the first… real sign of this changing

    Interviewer: Right.

    7:35
    Paulk: … you will find that there are ce – there are particular names that come up again and again and again. I sus – I think that… that the faction behind those names and their continuous reappearance, when by an objective – by an objective assessment, they are not the best of the best to that extent – certainly they are deserving of maybe one or two of those years, but there are others who are equally or more deserving, who have been crowded out by this particular faction. And, it was inevitable that there would be some kind of reaction against that faction. And that faction has, I think, not taken terribly well to having their control challenged.

    8:34
    (Rick’s transcription starts here)
    [clueless interviewer asks rhetorical question about SPs being troublemakers/shitkickers, causing the ugliness. How does that jibe with just trying to increase participation? What efforts to avoid tribalism and squabbling?]

    Paulk: I have certainly being doing what I can to avoid doing that.
    [stuff about open SP4 process and participation by nominal opponents]
    [resulting list is functionally a lot like Locust’s list or Scalzi’s list.]
    [stuff about SP4 being just a recommendations list for consideration]

    [clueless interviewer stuff about five Noah Wards in Spokane.] Do you anticipate another Hugo year like last year?

    Paulk: I certainly hope that that will not happen. I very much fear that if it does, it will be the death knell of the Hugos, and I don’t want to see that happen.

    Interviewer: What do you see going into the Business Meetings? WIth the rules changes, and what impact do you think that’s going to have on putting together recommendations lists?

    Paulk: I don’t see those rules changes affecting efforts to put together recommendations lists. I do see that, if some of those rule changes go through, particularly the ones that are aimed at “excluding slates” – I think, if those go through, a number of people will actually turn their focus away from the Hugos, will decide that the Hugos are dead, the Hugos are no longer for me, and look to somewhere else that is more willing to accept other people’s input.

    Interviewer: Something like the Dragon Awards that have just been put together for DragonCon?

    Paulk: Yes. I do not think it is a coincidence that the Dragon Awards have started this year, after last year’s award. And not just the No Awards, either. The pre-award reception that Baen’s publisher, Toni Weiskopf, walked out of in disgust.

    Interviewer: I heard about that.

    Paulk: The wooden asterisks, to be polite.

    [stuff about outcome of the upcoming awards being a win or not]

    Paulk: One of the things that caused a great deal of anger last year was encouraging people to cheer the No Awards, but not permitting anyone to boo. That, rightly or wrongly, was seen as shutting down disagreement.

    Interviewer: [saw the live feed, friends commented that “Those people are just mean.”]

    Paulk: And people who see that sort of thing, and think “Wow, what horrible people.” What likelihood is there of those people saying “Well, yeah, I want to be part of this award where people are really mean?” [Trying to counter that. Not trying to widdle on the Hugos.]

    Interviewer: [Increase in the number of SP participants?]

    Paulk: Well, I wasn’t actually running it, last year. But I do think there was an increase in people who were interested.

  12. Just a warning: I am only about halfway through the bottle of wine required for this task, and it will take me a bit to finish up my comments. If I don’t come back shortly, you will know that the wine and my SJW credentials took precedence, and I will complete this on the next Business Day. 😉

  13. Dawn Incognito: You’ve said you have Siamese cats, right? They are Masters of Sass.

    Yes, indeedy. I had to put one of my meezers to sleep last year, the day before I flew out on my annual vacation trip to family and Sasquan (he was 16.5 years old, and had a good life and had been a wonderful companion to me, but yegods, it was still heart-wrenching). His poor brother, the SJW Credential Rescue half-meezer, had to spend 3.5 weeks by himself, without his companion of 13 years, with only a daily visit from my friend before I returned.

    At which point I adopted a black SJW Credential Rescue Demon Cat From Hell.

    I love this new cat to death, but seriously, after it having been 13 years from my last kitten, OMG, it’s like a frickin’ toddler who is into EVERYTHING when you’re at work — and when you are home, too, if he thinks that you are not paying enough attention to him. He thinks that it is great sport to fish out things which have not been completely chewed up by the sink disposal (such as banana peels, and celery or lettuce leaves), and leave them out on the kitchen floor as a “gift” for me — either while I am at work, or in the middle of the night, so that I step on them first thing in the morning when I get up. 🐱

  14. From JJ/RM’s transcription

    librarians don’t consider the Hugo Awards to be even relevant when it comes to deciding what books they are going to stock in their libraries

    As a starter for ten, we had Sean Wallace saying upthread that he could see the data showing libraries ordering Hugo winners, so there’s Paulk if not lying then certainly making an assertion without checking if there was any evidence to back it up.

  15. @JJ: The wine seems like a capital idea, and I think there’s a nice Vranec calling to me for personal attention before bed time. I thank you, albeit my liver protests. (Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.)

  16. @Mark:

    As a starter for ten, we had Sean Wallace saying upthread that he could see the data showing libraries ordering Hugo winners, so there’s Paulk if not lying then certainly making an assertion without checking if there was any evidence to back it up.

    You didn’t honestly expect that to be more than hand-waving advocacy rhetoric, though, did you? (Possibly 32 years or so using Internet media have lowered my standards so low I’d have difficulty limboing under them.)

  17. @JJ,

    I only lasted a few paragraphs into the transcript before concluding (again) that Paulk inhabits a different reality to ours.

    Offers a nice New Zealand Syrah or maybe a Pinot Noir?

  18. @Rick Moen

    I expect most of it to be “hand-waving advocacy rhetoric”, but I don’t think that’s a reason to to accept someone making stuff up as a post-hoc justification for doing something I think was wrong.

  19. Soon Lee: Offers a nice New Zealand Syrah or maybe a Pinot Noir?

    How about a lovely, tart, citrusy, and crisp Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc? 😀

  20. Yeah, that’s mostly alternate reality stuff. The one place where she’s got a reality-related point is about the Sasquan reception and awards ceremony. I don’t blame people for giving a middle finger to the folks who were screwing up the Hugo process–I rather share that sentiment myself–but they should have owned up to it rather than pretending all that offense was given by accident. You can’t be as good with words and symbols and commnication as pretty much everyone involved was and not have some idea how the asterisks and the raucous cheering for no award would be perceived.

    I’m skeptical of the idea that the failure mode of clever is always asshole. Sometimes it’s just less clever than you think, or just not funny, or WTF?, or huh? But sometimes it is asshole, and that was one of those times. On the other hand, George R. R. Martin did a classy job of it, so it can be done right.

  21. @Mark: To be serious for a moment, there’s no immediately obvious metric for what librarians (for some arbitrary large set deemed to represent ‘librarians’) consider relevant in deciding what to stock in their libraries, regardless of what Sean Wallace said upthread about data showing what books librarians ordered. (That would putatively show correlation. Each ANSI standard librarian’s underlying motive would remain debatable.)

    Seemed to me, that (meaning the Paulk snippet about librarians) would fall in the category of classic Frankfurtian bullshit — something uttered with an eye towards commiting neither truth nor falsity but rather a kind of attention-distracting humbug that sidesteps the question of factual epiphenomena.

    (If I have more of this Vranec, words like ‘epiphenomena’ may have to wait for the morn.)

  22. John A Arkansawyer:

    “You can’t be as good with words and symbols and commnication as pretty much everyone involved was and not have some idea how the asterisks and the raucous cheering for no award would be perceived.”

    What do you mean by this? That the cheering for No Award was coordinated and decided upon as part of the Hugo Ceremony? You don’t think the cheering was spontaneous?

  23. John A Arkansawyer: Yeah, that’s mostly alternate reality stuff. The one place where she’s got a reality-related point is about the Sasquan reception and awards ceremony.

    Yes… but really, no.

    She claims that people were encouraged to cheer for No Awards, which is a complete and utter lie. They weren’t.

    She also complains about people being told not to boo — but that was a measure implemented to protect the feelings of the Puppy entries which had been cheated onto the ballot, who did get booed a little bit by a few people the first time around.

    It wasn’t done to stop the Puppies from booing. It was done to protect Puppies from the potential booing of the rest of the Hugo Awards attendees — most of whom were very clearly not Puppies.

    I find it really interesting that the Puppies insist on being utterly oblivious to the fact that David Gerrold, whom they have repeatedly and vitriolically reviled, told the Hugo Awards attendees very emphatically not to boo so as to spare the Puppies that potential bit of humiliation.

  24. @Hampus Eckerman: No, just that David Gerrold should have told people to tone it down. The crowd doing it once was totally understandable. I would have done it myself, had I been there. But once was enough to make the point. After that, it was redundant at best and bad sportsmanship at worst.

    Thank you for calling me on that. It wasn’t worded as clearly as it could have been. I’m glad to clarify.

  25. I was very happy to cheer for No Award again this year. If the same kind of bigoted views and hate mongering will be nominated another year, I will cheer again. And I hope everyone will cheer with me.

  26. John A Arkansawyer: The crowd doing it once was totally understandable. I would have done it myself, had I been there. But once was enough to make the point. After that, it was redundant at best and bad sportsmanship at worst.

    Were you there, John? Because I was, in about the 30th row, just to the right of center. And that is pretty much exactly what happened. The crowd cheered pretty loudly after the first No Award — no doubt in relief at the realization that the worst possible outcome (Hugo Awards going to crap entries) was not going to happen.

    After Gerrold’s admonition, the cheering of No Award announcements was decidedly subdued.

    Anyone who claims otherwise is, if not lying, let us say, is not speaking from an objective point-of-view.

  27. @JJ: I think David Gerrold meant well by telling people not to boo. Again, I would have done that in his shoes. It’s only in retrospect that it seems to me honest booing would have been preferable to the big cheers for no award. That was probably not foreseeable.

    What I think should have been clear in the moment, and possibly before, was that the very enthusiastic cheering for no award was booing by other means. Maybe I judge that too harshly and it just wasn’t foreseeable, but not trying to shut it down was an error in the moment that I think was avoidable.

  28. @Rick Moen

    Be it “classic Frankfurtian bullshit” or “rhetoric” or whatever, it falls into a category I will name “not actually the truth”. Possibly your criteria for when Paulk crosses a line for you differs from mine.
    (I’ll note I think there’s a difference between a bit of rhetoric followed by actual facts and logical argument, and an argument only supported by the rhetoric. The latter is what I suspect JJs analysis will show, based on all the previous arguments Paulk has tried to make)

  29. Confess, the whole ‘Asterisk means substandard’ thing is a specific subcultural reference that went completely over my head – In this bit of the world it generally indicates an above average performance – Above the top grade in an exam, that kind of thing.
    Even if giving Sasquan the benefit of the doubt there, they still could have reacted better – the “we are sorry if we gave offence” message took a long time to come.

  30. ” It’s only in retrospect that it seems to me honest booing would have been preferable to the big cheers for no award. That was probably not foreseeable.”

    Honest booing by dishonest people.

  31. Gerrold did admonish the audience that booing was not appropriate. Maybe he should have done it after the first time it happened.

    But it’s hard to second-guess someone having to do it in the heat of the moment (and it was a charged ceremony). There was also some question about how audible the booing was, especially to someone onstage. Overall I thought Gerrold did a good job. The asterisk thing did miss the mark though but I can understand the sentiment underlying it.

    After all the vitriol hurled by Puppy leaders for months , I expected a less graceful ceremony than what we got.

    ETA: The cheering for No Award? I watched the livestream. I cheered.

  32. NickPheas: Confess, the whole ‘Asterisk means substandard’ thing is a specific subcultural reference that went completely over my head – In this bit of the world it generally indicates an above average performance – Above the top grade in an exam, that kind of thing. Even if giving Sasquan the benefit of the doubt there, they still could have reacted better – the “we are sorry if we gave offence” message took a long time to come.

    Personally, I would very much have preferred that the asterisk thing had not been done.

    But in this bit of the world, it simply means “there is something unusual about this particular record of exceptional performance — see footnote to find out what that ‘something unusual’ is”. (The main cultural referent is that, yes, Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s 34-year-old single-season home run record*, the asterisk being *Babe Ruth managed 60 home runs in only 154 games, while Roger Maris got 61 home runs, but in a season of 161 games — thus giving him greater opportunity to get more home runs).

    In other words, “Attainment of the position “Hugo Award Finalist” or “Hugo Award Winner” in this year reflects unusual circumstances, compared to most award years.”

    The Puppies are the ones who decided that the asterisks had something to do with assholes and anuses.

  33. @JJ: I was not there. I was on the stream. Your direct experience is better than my second-hand experience. Other people have reported differently from their direct experience. Their reports jibe more closely with my second-hand experience.

    I’ve yet to hear an informed first-hand report from someone who doesn’t have a side in the fight.

  34. @JJ: Yes, about the encouraged-cheering and about the told-not-to-boo stuff, thanks. Beat me to it. I am not sure this is a lie, but it’s certainly not the case.

    (ObSF:

    Renner: Wrong!
    Blaine: The tactful way, the polite way to disagree with the Senator would be to say, ‘That turns out not to be the case.’
    Renner: Hey, I like that. Anyway, the Senator’s wrong.)

    Paulk appears to now live in the Eastern seaboard of the USA (was recently naturalised a US citizen in Pennsylvania per search about where she lives lately), but in 2015 was in Brisbane, Queensland. I don’t recall her being present at Sasquan, and am going to offhandedly guess not. (I obviously could be mistaken.) So, I’m guessing she’s credulously repeating someone’s embellished tale of the Sasquan Hugo Ceremony, having not been there herself. (Like JJ, I did attended that high-drama event, and I was also proudly a Sasquan staffer). So, I surmise, not anything worth calling a lie in context, but something definitely entirely, notably, and tellingly incorrect.

    (ETA: For what it’s worth, I didn’t applaud the five Noahs in Spokane, nor the two Noahs in KC. No criticism of those who did; they tend to have reasonable rationales. It just would have seemed really awkward and easily interpreted the way Paulk chose to, so I didn’t.)

  35. John A Arkansawyer: I’ve yet to hear an informed first-hand report from someone who doesn’t have a side in the fight.

    I honestly don’t think you ever will. You are either going to hear from Puppies, or you are going to hear from people who care passionately about the Hugo Awards and found the Puppies’ attempt to cheat their way into rockets to be appalling and in dire need of a smackdown. 😐

  36. @JJ: Yeah. I tried to interest someone in a position to send a reasonably unbiased hard news reporter in doing so and failed. Probably just as well, as the small world effect turned up. The news editor I knew had known one of the very involved parties for a long time. I did not know that till after I tried.

    @Hampus Eckerman:

    Honest booing by dishonest people.

    You know, until you said that, I’d forgotten who booed and when. My mistake!

    What I was thinking was that I’d’ve rather heard honest booing of Mister Beale, the one indisputably bad actor involved and the biggest winner (which isn’t saying much) in the incident, than the cheering for no award, but my faulty memory has put me a little out of alignment with reality myself.

  37. @Mark: ‘Be it “classic Frankfurtian bullshit” or “rhetoric” or whatever, it falls into a category I will name “not actually the truth”.’

    I hate to be guilty of pounding a point into the ground, but: How in Gehenna would one — in the real world — establish the truth of what data librarians do and do not consider relevant, when they are deciding what books to stock in their libraries?

    Nobody has that data. Yes, in theory one might poll the librarians of the world, but nobody’s expending the money to do that. One can stretch the meaning of a bunch of marginally related data and claim to have determined what information librarians consider relevant, like determining (pace Sean Wallace) that books ordered match certain awards patterns and impute decisions to have been based on those awards — but that’s not actually even close to the same thing.

    And, if you think about the problem for even a few seconds, it’s pretty obvious that nobody has that data, nobody’s ever had that data, nobody’s likely to have that data. So, Paulk claiming librarians don’t consider Hugo data relevant indeed isn’t actually the truth — but it isn’t actually falsity, either. Thus my point. Which I’m pretty sure I just pounded into the ground.

    If you haven’t read Prof. Frankfurt’s little essay, I do recommend it. (He was after my time at my college, but a popular teacher, and this is the single most popular thing he ever wrote by a long stretch, FWIW.)

  38. Rick, the reductio ab absurdum of your argument is that as no-one can truly prove anything, no-one can ever really lie about anything, which is a conclusion I find myself utterly disinterested in as it prevents anything practical ever getting done.
    As your standards for what constitutes being untruthful differ so much from my own, you can assume that any further comments I make about Paulk aren’t an attempt to persuade you of anything.

  39. Mark, er, well then, I sure hope I didn’t say that. (Could be the Vranec speaking, but I think not.)

    I hope the point is clear that some claims are basically designed to be in-practice untestable, hence the truth value cannot be determined in the real world, hence their function is not factual but rather as (to be polite) social lubricant or worse.

    Some claims are testable claims of fact. I can be determined from facts and figures to be a red-headed, left-handed, polyglot Norwegian-American who’s drunk a wee bit too much Vranec and ought to go to bed. Some are debatable but such that nobody with a sense of decency would object, such as ‘Melissa Rosenberg is a genius scriptwriter’ and ‘JCW cannot write a simple declarative sentence to save his life.’

    Und so weiter.

  40. Rick, as my ability to successfully articulate my standards for what constitutes Paulk being untruthful is inversely related to the amount of wine I have consumed in an effort to dull the pain of actually having to listen to Paulk’s senseless meanderings and non sequiturs over and over again while I transcribed them, you can assume that any further comments I make about Paulk’s untruthfulness will not be made until the next business day.

    But yeah, I’m pretty much with Mark-kitteh on this one.

  41. @JJ: I feel your pain, and appreciate your, and your liver’s, noble sacrifice. ;->

    (ETA: When a Californian cannot successfully write ‘I feel your pain’ on the first try, it’s definitely time to go to sleep.)

  42. Rick Moen:

    “I hate to be guilty of pounding a point into the ground, but: How in Gehenna would one — in the real world — establish the truth of what data librarians do and do not consider relevant, when they are deciding what books to stock in their libraries?”

    Do a google search on “Hugo Awards” and “libraries” and you will see a quite clear indication of that plenty of libraries hold the Hugos in high esteem.

  43. Kip W: The other dedication of his that I particularly liked was when he dedicated 10% of a book to his agent. Some years ago, Pratchett observed that the best part of celebrating his 50th birthday at his publisher’s was that they immediately held back 15% against returns.

    John A Arkansawyer: that’s a wonderful Barnes quote; I think I know the source but would like to be sure; rot13 it?

    Normally toastmasters don’t have to ask Hugo audiences not to boo nominees. If Gerrold had done this before the first time it happened, he would have been slammed for assuming that some nominees would be booed; I think he handled this as well as it could be handled.

  44. @Hampus: Well, I certainly would hope librarians hold the Hugos in high esteem, as someone who’s a recurring Worldcon staffer and annual nominator, voter, and attendee. However, it’s open to question whether (in aggregate) they order books merely on the basis of that information, or on the basis of other indicia of quality and desirability. It’s not unknown for Hugo voters to pick a finalist who/that is, after all, good by other criteria as well. ;->

  45. @Chip Hitchcock: It’s from Rnegu Znqr bs Tynff. Were you right?

    I think Kaleidoscope Century is his best, though it’s also his ugliest, but Rnegu Znqr bs Tynff is his most important. And it’s ugly in places, too–that one image right near the end haunts me. If you’ve read it, you’ll know exactly which one I mean.

    I’m trying to decide if I want to re-read it while I have it off the shelf. It’s the hardcover and not one of the reading copies, which are in a box somewhere. But I remember the first time I read it. I was about a third of the way from the end when I stopped on my way back to work and opened it over lunch. I never made it back to work that day, and almost got written up over it, which was Nothing next to the bleak and empty feeling it gave me. Gur nssnve orgjrra Znetnerg naq Xncvyne was obvious all along. I think Barnes did that to distract us from the true horror to come. A worthy heir to Graham Greene.

    I’m not sure I want to re-read it just now. But I’m finding myself thumbing through it. Like the Necronomicon. It calls me.

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