174 thoughts on “Comments for August 31”

  2. @junego

    I’m reeaaalllly behind on viewing comments, but has anyone seen or posted this?

    Westboro Baptist Church at Dragon Con?!?

    I guess God Hates Fans. Who knew? 🙂

  3. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate the contents of the File770 housekeeping comments. Someday, the piecing together of dissociated comments will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new Pixel Scroll.

  4. Cassy B on August 31, 2016 at 7:32 am said:
    Right; the shoggoth has been removed to the big galvanized tub I put in the closet of the spare bedroom, with its stack of Perry Rhodan novels. (I think it’s happy; I lured it there by putting the books down in a trail…)
    Anyone have a Biohazard sign to put up on the closet door…?
    (Why, yes, there IS a monster in the closet. Why do you ask?)

    Perhps we could just leave a note on the fridge:
    Do not disturb the new kitty!
    She’s a bit shy, and seems to be living in the closet.

  5. I take it back. I think there is a way to make a rough estimate of how many people nominated from the Sad Puppies list. I’ll see if I can expand on this, but my first estimate is 10 to 12.

  6. If you think cleaning up cat vomit is disgusting, just wait until you get to the shuggoth-vomit…

    [I have been enormously enjoying the welcome-home clean-up activities on the list. Wish I had more energy to participate but I’m in the middle of intensive revisions on Mother of Souls. And that’s in my “free” time.]

  7. @JJ
    That site is a less-funny version of The Onion.

    Oops, sorry. I should have put the googly eyes on my post. I thought it was funnyish. 😐

  8. I think my mate Bob’s got a Hound of Tindalos. I could ask him to pop round with it, would that help?

    Hounds of Tindalos never pop round.

  9. @Greg Hullender: looking forward to hearing the rest of your thoughts and reasoning on this 🙂 I find myself quite fascinated by the groups of Puppies, their perceptions of their impact and their actual numbers and impact.

  10. I finally took a look at the Dragon Award photo. I liked the look of it, but the over-the-top cheesy description reminded me of something I had seen a few years back. There was a self-published terrible author pushing his books on mobileread.com and had a meltdown. I looked at his web site at the time, and in the “about the author” page, there was a photo of him with his hands on his face wearing a ring–and in the text it told how the stone in his ring was really the frozen tear of a dragon and various details about how he ended up with it, in even more purple prose than the Dragon Award description–it was the type of thing a 12-year old would have written in fan-fiction–and cringed about when rereading it 2 years later.

    Wanting to find it again, I just did a lot of googling to re-find the name of the author in hopes that the cheesy page was still around. Turns out that, yes, he’s still around (and against all odds, found some fans.) Unfortunately, the purple author description is gone, but the photo is still there.

    Also, I see that he has had other ban-inducing meltdowns since his tenure at mobileread. All things concidered, he seems like he would be a good fit for the MGC.

    (Edit to add: FWIW, I’m the “ardeegee” in the Mobileread thread.)

  11. #tiptoes into File770 with magic carpetbag

    #opens carpetbag

    #takes out *C*O*N*G*R*A*T*U*L*A*T*I*O*N*S M*I*K*E* banner with Big Shiny Magenta letters against GOLD background and hangs it on amazingly clean wall

    #pulls out and hides multi-layer multi-flavor cake in closet for later

    #starts to tiptoe out

    #hears GOBBLING from closet

    #peeks in to see shoggoth covered with cake crumbs

    #scritches shoggoth under her chin

    #sees note on fridge

    #picks up magic carpetbag and dashes out to buy shoggoth chow

  13. @JJ

    Thank you so much for taking the lead on the File770 bench and also the File770 upgrade. I was very appreciative of the chance to show OGH how much he means to us.

  14. @Bruce Arthurs

    I might have nightmares based on that photo. That’s not a house it’s an evil overlords idea of a perfect office. *shudder*

    I suggest distracting OGH with all the wonderful pictures of MACII. By the time he notices the mess we can convince him he made it. 😉

  15. BTW, my local area (well, maybe a half-hour drive from here) is making national (possibly international?) news this week. It seems that we might be suffering from a clown infestation. No information yet on whether they are frugal spenders or if they understand the physics behind electromagnetism.

    (Personally, I think it is a hoax pulled off by the lizard man on vacation.)

  16. Greg:

    Best result is that in the top six categories (all I’ve checked so far) all of the “hostages” would have made the top 5 list even without the puppies. So the “hostage” strategy was an epic fail.

    How do you determine what was a ‘hostage’? If anything not a blatant Puppy nominee (Castalia House, Mad Genius etc.) is a hostage, that would imply that they managed to predict four out of five of the top novellas (rather than influencing the choice), which seems rather surprising.

  17. Re number of Sad Puppy nominators: Sad Puppies Fight Back by Declan Finn (not an RP nominee, and hence a definite marker of Sadness) got 95 nominations in BRW. (Something with that level of support would not reach the longlist in Novel, and indeed Finn’s novel, which we hoped to use as a marker, does not appear.)

    Of course, since the SP list was not presented as a slate, one can’t perfectly estimate the number of nominators influenced by it.

  18. Stranger Things has been renewed for season 2. No surprise there. Its great.

    …but I kind of hoped that they would go the American Horror Stories route and tell a completly different story in season two. Im probably in the minority there though.

  19. I kind of get the feeling that a lot of folks want Stranger Things 2 to be The Adventures of Barb After Her Miraculous Escape.

    (Which, to be honest, wouldn’t bother me in the slightest.)

  20. Internet Archive:

    The jewel you see glowing in the ring in my authors photo isn’t really a jewel at all. It is the crystallized tear from a real dragon. In my novel “The Royal Dragoneers” you might find the moment where this wonderfully magical teardrop fell from a green dragons eye. It hardened on its way down to land in a mess of troll corpses that the dragon was laying on.

    My grandfather died before I was born, but the ring was given to me by my mother, after my grandmother recently died. My grandfather apparently won the ring in a poker game near the Red River between Texas and Oklahoma sometime in the early 1900’s.

    It has been a boon, the magic of the teardrop, for it brought you here to me didn’t it? Now treat yourself to something fantastic and try the free sample of one of my novels. I hope you enjoy the journey. It will be spectacular.

  21. IIRC they already stated Barb really is dead. I guess they would make the professor come back and battle it out with 11 and missing boy would still glide over to the other side… So, you know, more of the same. I thought series 1 had a good ending and I liked that it wasnt 100% resolved. I felt the same about Mr. Robot so make of that what you will…

  24. rcade: Thanks! I didn’t think of looking for an archived copy. I’m glad that it survived so that we all can bask in its glory.

  26. Count me in the “Do something different” camp for Stranger Things, but maybe next time.

    Speaking of Netflix, new Bill Nye show!

    Each episode will tackle a topic from a scientific point of view, dispelling myths, and refuting anti-scientific claims that may be espoused by politicians, religious leaders or titans of industry
    ….
    Interestingly, the show features both a Head Science Writer (astronomer, author, and award-winning science communicator Phil Plait) and a Head Comedy Writer (Mike Drucker, who has served on both of Jimmy Fallon’s talk shows, Late Night and The Tonight Show).

  27. Everyone’s always talking about Bill Nye. Am I the only one who preferred Beakman’s World?

  28. Nye. Beakman. Pfaugh! I much prefer the classics:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J96h5viahAA

    [Sadly, this episode doesn’t include my favorite exchange:
    “That’s right, Jimmy, and as the water gets ‘hotter,’ it begins to ‘boil.'”
    “Golly whillikers, Mr. Science! You wouldn’t slip me the old rubber peach just because I’m a gullible child, would you?”]

  29. “How much is that Shaaaa-ggoth in the closet?” (arf-arf)
    “The one with the waggly tail?”
    “How large is that Shaaaa-ggoth in the closet?” (crunch-crunch)
    “The one that eats pulps by the bale…”

  31. This brings to mind another children’s educational program called Science Court from the same period–I only caught a handful of episodes, but enjoyed those (being in their key demographic of my mid- to late-20s at the time.)

    And Lester makes me think of an older (than Nye, Beakman, or Science Court–newer than Mr. Science) show–Math Patrol.

    (Looks like most if not all of Science Court is on Youtube–at least a little of Math Patrol is, too.)

  32. @Peer: Um, I’ve been saving Stranger Things until I finished the draft I turned in last night, and a actually had managed to avoid any major spoilers until this page of comments. Anti-thanks. That’s what rot13 is for.

  33. Post-edit-time update:

    @Joe H, you too. 🙁 Please, it really hasn’t been that long for the show.

  35. If we get low on pulps for the shoggoth, I’d recommend checking with the local library – they may have more than they want. (I’m not really sure that we really want the shoggoth eating pulp romance novels.)

  37. @Joe H: OK, good. I’ve got “If I Could Turn Back Time” queued up here for a montage of you fixing it. 🙂

  39. Possibly it was just overhyped by the time I got to it, but I found I wasn’t greatly impressed by Stranger Things. I think it could’ve done with being half its length.

  41. Hmm, all the people trying to guess what the ballots would look like without Rabid contributions (me, Stephanie Zvan, Doris V. Sutherland, Greg soon, and maybe others) are coming up with different results. I don’t think the exact ranking of the nominees matters much, but it at least would be nice to determine which Rabid-slated items belong in the long list on their own merits. (As for the Sad favorite “Tuesdays with Molakesh the Destroyer”…. its nomination seems to me to be a spiteful hangover from last year, but would it be fair to say it doesn’t belong on the longlist when it wasn’t on a slate this year?)

  44. Now I want all you kids to play nice, daddy will soon be back online. 😉

  46. Hm.

    At this point, wouldn’t it be easier to just build a replica File770 over top of the old one? It would save us from mopping up the shoggoth slime? I… hope that is slime.

  47. @Camestros: Even if you somehow managed to get everything painted white, the shoggoth is still going to smell eldritch. With a hint of disintegrating German pulp fiction. And there ain’t no variety of Febreeze that will clear that up.

    We can recycle the Post-Its along with the pizza boxes and wine bottles.

    Now, eventually we’re gonna run out of even Perry Rhodan. The question is, do we keep the shoggoth on a diet of other pulps, feed it our other childhood regrets, feed it the modern equivalent of pulps, give it the mediocre comics that dealers are always putting in the bargain bins, or try to class up its diet with decent SFF?

    I… I think we’re just gonna have to ‘fess up to Mike that we have a pet shoggoth.

  48. Tasha, the office image came from a film adaptation of Kafka’s THE TRIAL, so yeah, nightmare territory. I should probably have put a trigger warning on it.

  49. Can we get the shoggoth registered as a Battlefield/Mission Earth disposal system?

    That might well be a worthy cause.

    (I don’t think “cruel & unusual” applies to shoggoths.)

  50. Why would nominating “Tuesdays with Molakesh the Destroyer” be spiteful? I thought it was a good story.

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