DisCon III Declines to Comment on Code of Conduct Issue About Hugo Finalist

Soon after the 2021 Hugo Awards finalists were announced, Chris Logan Edwards asked in comments here, “How is ‘George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun’ not a violation of the DisCon III Code of Conduct?” That eye-catching phrase is attached to a Best Related Work finalist whose complete title is “George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off Into the Sun, Or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)”, Natalie Luhrs (Pretty Terrible, August 2020).

The specific issue is that DisCon III disseminated this phrase on its website, in press releases, and on YouTube – and in doing so the committee itself (not Natalie Luhrs’ blog publication) violated their own Code of Conduct.

The applicable parts of DisCon III’s Code of Conduct are —

We do not tolerate harassment of convention attendees in any form. Behavior that will be considered harassment includes, but is not limited to…

Comments directly intended to belittle, offend, or cause discomfort including telling others they are not welcome and should leave…

We require attendees to follow the CoC in online interactions with the convention (including the volunteer mailings, wiki, and other online facilities), at all convention venues and convention-related social activities.

I sent Edwards’ question to several committee members together with the request, “If your immediate thought is that the Hugo voters can trump your Code of Conduct, please explain why you think that.”

DisCon III’s decision to broadcast this phrase on their own platform means they also are committing to having it repeated over and over again in all their venues. As Elio M. García, Jr. explained in another comment here:

Websites around the world have amplified that a member of the WSFS should fuck off. Every official publication that lists the nomination is telling a member of the WSFS to fuck off. The Hugo Nominees discussion panel will have people talking about how GRRM (and Robert Silverberg) should fuck off. On the night of the ceremonies, the screen, the presenter, the sign language interpreter will be announcing to an audience of hundreds that specific members of the WSFS should fuck off.

(Garcia is webmaster of Westeros, a George R.R. Martin fan site not run by the author.)

Tonight Adam Beaton, the Worldcon’s Outreach Division Head, emailed the committee’s reply to my question:

Our response for publication is, “DisCon III does not publicly comment on potential Code of Conduct matters.”

Have a great day, Mike!

The leadership is going to find out how hard it is to administer a Code of Conduct they are unwilling to publicly account to themselves.

Screencap of Malka Older announcing the 2021 Best Related Work Hugo finalists on April 14.

772 thoughts on “DisCon III Declines to Comment on Code of Conduct Issue About Hugo Finalist

  1. TIL that documenting people’s poor behavior is harassing them.

    I guess Bob Woodward owes Nixon an apology.

  2. Nagaina: A list of other eligible works can be found here. Personally, I would like to have seen The Magic of Terry Pratchett.

  3. Martin Easterbook: She genuinely believes that George is a malevolent influence on fandom who must be driven out.

    Lol. [citation needed]

    For someone who thinks it’s fair to be brutally honest, you sure seem to have a strained relationship with the truth.

    Again, the only one putting GRRM and “uniquely evil monster” in the same sentence is you.

  4. I don’t think this discussion’s slow transmutation into “oh yeah? well I was/they were/we were harmed THIS MUCH” – both in terms of arguments and requests/demands for such pain to be reported – so that something inherently intangible can somehow be weighed up as a Win or a Must-Be-This-Injured-To-Ride qualifier is a good thing. This is not something that can be measured and compared; we can only see that there is emotional distress flying around everywhere.

    (I’m not going to say “on both sides” because there appears to be roughly one side per participant.)

    I’m not trying to suggest we should all be Internet Vulcans and ignore emotion, seeking “rationality” and “objectivity” by ignoring half the information. The hurt matters – yes, all of it. But it can’t be measured, and even if it could, one hurt being “bigger” wouldn’t make the other hurt irrelevant. Pain should not be and cannot be a competition.

    (Alright, getting that thru the fog was painful and exhausting, so I can’t also do the individual replies I wanted to right now – sorry, everyone.

    … Except this one! Phooooo I really need to pay more attention to The Spreadsheet for next year, there’s some fascinating sounding titles on that list for BRW. @Hampus, thanks for the reminder.)

  5. @Martin Easterbrook

    Gotta question your police work there a bit.

    The article has been nominated in a category that has become one for works of critical scholarship.

    Looking at the history of nominations and winners, that’s not even remotely accurate. Furthermore, custom is nice, but rules are binding. If the work is within the rules, it’s a legitimate nomination on its own merits.

    It’s this a work of critical scholarship? For those who haven’t read it we can wait for a moment. It clearly isn’t. If we are honest it is totally obvious what it is.

    Opinion. And you’re entitled to it! But that doesn’t make it binding on others.

    It’s a work of harassment.

    Opinion and accusation. I don’t want to play the “no, you’re the harasser here” game (there’s nothing so boring as hypocrisy aikido), but while you’re complaining about Luhrs saying bad things about GRRM, it would be better perhaps not to sling unfounded accusations around about others?

    Did it’s nominators nominate it as a work of scholarship? Does anyone think that is even remotely possible?

    As noted above, they don’t have to nominate it as a work of scholarship, because despite your assertions, that’s not how the rules define the category.

    They nominated it as an act of harassment.

    You’d need some actual evidence for that, even if your inductive reasoning-shaped writing weren’t based on opinions are not necessarily shared. The evidence goes the other way.

    Basically, you made up a rule and decided that anyone who isn’t following it is doing so for the worst possible reasons. You do you, of course, but it’s not exactly probative.

  6. @rcade: you should consider reading ithe blog. Then you’d know that nowhere in it does Luhrs say “that George is a malevolent influence on fandom who must be driven out.”

    So we remain [citation needed]

  7. @evilrooster: When you answer “The article has been nominated in a category that has become one for works of critical scholarship” with “Looking at the history of nominations and winners, that’s not even remotely accurate”, I have to agree though I might wish it were otherwise (as I suspect the OP does).

    Looking at this listing here, the first thirty years of the award went to books. The last ten years have awarded four books, two blog posts, a speech, and whatever AO3 is. (Don’t take my inability to describe it as a lack of respect for it–it’s a failure of imagination on my part. If I didn’t respect it, I’d say so.)

    The award has taken a distinct turn.

  8. Hopefully, just as people now understand why Ng gave the speech that she did, a couple of years from now we’ll look at this incident as a much needed catalyst for change.

  9. It’s a work of harassment.

    To have and express feelings of ire towards the actions of another is not harassment. There is no logic so pretzeled as to even begin to start to make that true. And trying it on just gets in the way of an actual issue, which is whether DisCon would violate its own CoC every time this particular piece is cited, noted, or mentioned.

    I mean, I’m pretty sure nearly everyone who commented here at the time was highly critical of GRRM’s execrable job at being toastmaster and that wasn’t harassment either.

    They nominated it as an act of harassment.

    Citation needed.

    Also, what @Meredith said.

  10. @John A Arkansawyer:

    An earlier paragraph in that very same link explains some of that change:

    It was originally titled the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book and was first awarded in 1980. In 1999 the Award was retitled to the Hugo Award for Best Related Book, and eligibility was officially expanded to fiction works that were primarily noteworthy for reasons besides their fictional aspects. In 2010, the title of the award was again changed, to the Hugo Award for Best Related Work.

    I suspect the Rise of the Internet has a good deal to do with that. We present and consume information in different forms, and sizes, via different media. It’s not as surprising as all that that that information has also started coming in different tones and registers as well. (Not just Luhrs’ blog post, either. One of the reasons the Beowulf translation is such a hit is that it’s in internet dialect.)

  11. If the work is within the rules, it’s a legitimate nomination on its own merits.

    I don’t know what you’re meaning there by “merits,” but the Puppies filled the ballot for several years with works chosen for reasons other than their quality. A lot were because the authors were themselves and their friends. Others were to prank the ballot to show contempt for the awards.

  12. bill: But other familiar literary awards like the Tiptree and Laura Ingalls Wilder awards changed their names without such ungraciousness from recipients, as (further from the literary field) did the [yawningly long list of awards that have changed names].

    Why is the person with the best platform — the winner at the moment all eyes are focused on the award — supposed to be the only person forbidden from criticizing the name of the award if they have the exceptional courage it takes to do so?

    And let’s look at one of your examples, the American Library Association resolution to take Melvil Dewey’s name (not “Melvin”) off the award named for him. Here is a quote from the resolution:

    Whereas Melvil Dewey did not permit Jewish people, African Americans, or other minorities admittance to the resort owned by Dewey and his wife;
    Whereas he was censured by the New York State Board of Regents for his refusal to admit Jews to his resort, whereupon he resigned as New York State Librarian;
    Whereas Dewey made numerous inappropriate physical advances toward women he worked with and wielded professional power over;
    Whereas during the 1906 ALA conference there was a movement to censure Dewey after four women came forward to accuse him of sexual impropriety, and he was ostracized from the organization for decades…

    This is simple, raw subject matter that does not require euphemism or “gracious” eliding of the problem. And to think the Melvil Dewey Medal was created in 1952, despite all the things the ALA had been aware for years. I would not bet that the resistance to the award’s name gathered its strength with a bouquet of polite requests.

    I also reject your characterization of Ng’s speech. Sure, I myself was a bit deafened by the opening lines, but there was a lot more to it. Ng’s text is here if anyone wants to be reminded. I especially like this line:

    But [on] these bones, we have grown wonderful, ramshackle genre, wilder and stranger than his mind could imagine or allow.

    And at the end Ng said:

    I’m sorry to drag this into our fantastical words, you’ve given me a microphone and this is what I felt needed saying.

    Ng expected to pay a price for doing what they thought was needed, and has in terms of people like you who still can’t get over the shock, although they also got a Hugo for the speech, so it may not have turned out to be as high a price as they were prepared to pay.

  13. you should consider reading the blog. Then you’d know that nowhere in it does Luhrs say “that George is a malevolent influence on fandom who must be driven out.”

    He was paraphrasing and you’re acting like you expected to find those words in a direct quote.

    The sentiments expressed in the essay — calling GRRM not learning pronunciations “disgusting and racist as fuck,” calling him and Robert Silverberg “gross racist misogynist transphobes” and declaring “let us shoot George R.R. Martin and Bob Silverberg into the sun where they shall bother us no longer” all support Easterbrook’s interpretation that she wants him and people like him gone.

    It’s the whole point of the title and the essay: YOU ARE TERRIBLE, YOU HURT PEOPLE AND I WANT YOU GONE.

    But if you want to explain that Luhrs actually meant that she’s receptive to having the gross racist misogynistic transphobe fuck off into the sun, improbably survive the experience and return to the Hugo ceremony someday, I am all ears.

  14. @rcade: One of the reasons that EPH was a good solution to the Puppies is that it’s impossible use the purity of the nominator’s heart to judge the legitimacy of a nomination. Some people may use their right to nominate for the most terrible of reasons, some for the best of them, but most people are in the messy middle somewhere. And we don’t know which is which.

    A lot of the wilder accusations and more heated content in this conversation arise from the same impulse to scry out reasons and judge them for legitimacy. It’s still a fool’s errand. No one knows the content of another’s heart. Nobody does things for only one reason. No one’s unwritten rules are the same as anyone else’s, and even the written rules can have many interpretations.

    The conclusion was that the fairest way to deal with the problem was not to deal with it, but instead to make sure that the final ballot reflected the spread of opinions of what belongs on it. That will inevitably include people whose motivations you don’t approve of, some whose motivations I don’t approve of, etc.

    So…a legitimate nomination on its own merits is a nomination of a work that fits into the category description and which has been made by a legitimate nominator. Those are the merits that the rules recognize, because anything else gets into, well, exactly this sort of pointless drama.

  15. @evilrooster

    That what gets nominated has changed and that the internet is a large part of that (apparently a specific internet project was the impetus for the expanded eligibility) is certainly true, but one of the… slightly… less heated parts of this discussion is about whether that’s a good thing. I have several years worth of comments saying “enthusiastic yes”, including some possibly excessive celebrating over AO3’s win, but I’m now considering a “… maybe not” – not because of That Essay Wot We’re All Het Up About (one way or another) but as part of a process that started with Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding coming last (!) and a general impression that unless a book was Literally By Or About Le Guin, Specifically, it didn’t stand much of a chance.

    The category was expanded so stuff other than books got a look-in; it was not expanded so that books could be driven out entirely because they take nominators&voters more time to assess than an essay or video or weird grab bag item #32. And, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m here and I’m voting because I think books are pretty cool. There are SO MANY cool looking non-fiction titles that I didn’t get to this year (… I didn’t get to much this year) but would have felt really excited about seeing on the ballot. Non-fiction books are a huge amount of work, rarely pay as well as fiction does, and should stand a chance of winning or even being nominated in their own category.

    So here I am, eating several years worth of comments: I think I was wrong about Best Related Work not needing a change. Yes, even though it would probably nix my beloved AO3s eligibility, and similar fannish projects that I think totally worthy of recognition (have I been eyeing up Yuletide? Yes, yes I have). What that change should look like, well, I’m interested in seeing that discussion once we’re all done yelling at each other.

  16. ETA: tl;dr What Meredith just said.

    @evilrooster: I agree. And I’m not entirely unhappy by the turn. I quite seriously suggested nominating Chuck Tingle as a Best Related Work.

    But looking at that long list of books that got nominated and didn’t win made me sad. If Best Novel had been redefined to include Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) in 2010, we wouldn’t see as many books win that category in the last decade. We might’ve not seen any at all. It’s not a fair matching.

    I have no idea how to make it better. Split the category begs the question How?

    ETAAgain: All that said, I put the Lil Nas X music video onto the 2022 spreadsheet under Best Related Work, so I may be a hypocrite.

  17. @meredith: My post was more descriptive than normative, because I was responding o something that was simply not true.

    Should we have short- and long-form Related Work categories, or Related Books and Other Related Works? That sounds like a good and interesting discussion to have, but I have to say that I’m leery of trying to discuss it here. This conversation has not exactly built a consensus in the wider community about F770 as a good, listening and welcoming place to hash out difficult matters.

    Things may improve, but at the moment…well, it’s food for thought anyway, wherever it gets discussed.

  18. DisCon appears to have agreed to award the Hugos in accord with the Hugo rules. Implicit in that is an expectation that they will not try to stack the deck for or against a particular work, which requires representing, in their con materials, all the entries that are going to appear on the ballot in the same way. Readers should consider that at some point it may be their ox being gored and consider how they would respond.

    Of course, stacking the deck in favor of or against a particular entry would be the process for invoking the holiest of all fannish activities, the fan feud, so your parsecage* may vary.

    *film reference here.

  19. One of the reasons that EPH was a good solution to the Puppies is that it’s impossible to judge the legitimacy of a nomination by the purity of the nominator’s heart.

    We don’t have to go that far. This isn’t the pearly gates; it’s the Hugo Awards. As voters we can decide for ourselves whether a nomination was put on the ballot for legitimate or illegitimate reasons and vote accordingly.

    It isn’t pointless drama to have a stake in how the title’s presence on the ballot makes us look, whether it is mean-spirited and whether the con could just call it “The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (RageBlog Edition)” everywhere it had discretion to do so.

    If by the time of voting enough people either praise the rant or say they nominated it for legitimate reasons, it’ll be considered by voters on the merits.

    Hugo voters are fair. A lot of people even read all of the Puppy-nominated works and voted based on their merits. (Myself excluded. Couldn’t do it. Don’t regret it.)

  20. @evilrooster

    If you want to have the discussion elsewhere, you’re welcome to. I don’t plan my discussion venues around what people on Twitter have decided “File770’s stance” is this week, especially since it almost never has much of a relation to what that is. (Hint: Mike’s the only one who gets to decide that.)

  21. This conversation has not exactly built a consensus in the wider community about F770 as a good, listening and welcoming place to hash out difficult matters.

    This is a great place to do that once everybody wears themselves out from throwing haymakers and the discussion transitions into the argument afterparty.

  22. @meredith: For my part, it’s not the Mike’s views. It’s the unrestrained, unmoderated nastiness and bad faith of some of the commenters that’s offputting. Yes, yes, Twitter is not a hotbed of civility either, but it’s also not a single-owner space.

    @rcade: I’m sure the people who have had those haymakers land on them, or watched them land on others, will totally want to come back here for said conversation.

  23. evilrooster: This conversation has not exactly built a consensus in the wider community about F770 as a good, listening and welcoming place to hash out difficult matters.

    These kinds of descriptors impose false expectations on my blog as a further way of telling me to shut up. The people raising them only want to welcome what they approve, which isn’t my opinion about this CoC violation. And yet there may be as many as 150 comments here from people who disagree with me, which seems to me a necessary part of having a forum where fans can “hash out difficult matters.”

  24. I like the proposed idea of having a category for Non-Fiction Hugo (for NF books, documentaries, and perhaps blog series like Camestros’ ongoing Debarkle posts, if people ultimately judge those worthy) and one for “Other” or “Miscellaneous” which can include political screeds, speeches, articles of opinion, AO3, and any other weird SFF thing the Internet midwifes in the coming years.

    With regard to the screed about GRRM, I am astounded that people don’t seem to recall how, entirely by himself and with great effort and expense, GRRM stuck it to the Puppies and their slates by handing out the Alfies to make sure that people pushed off the ballot by the Pups got recognition for their works, including FIle770’s own Red Wombat. Anyone who claims that he’s become right-adjacent or a pox on fandom or deserves to be “shot into the sun” for screwing up the toastmaster speech and/or flubbing the Loser’s Party and/or not finishing A Song of Ice and Fire faster has a very, very short and selective memory. George has done far more to help protect fandom from the true racism, misogyny, and general other-ism out there than Natalie Luhrs has ever done, or, in my opinion, is ever likely to do.

    Speaking of short memories, remember when Laura Mixon got a Hugo for rooting out the sadism and cruelty of Benjanun Sriduangkaew, committed in the name of being “anti-racist” and “anti-sexist”? Is this kind of behavior now not only allowed at the Hugos, but actively celebrated? Fandom definitively rejected such things in 2015, and I hope — and honestly, expect — that they will reject it again at Discon 3.

    I’m one of those who bought a supporting membership to cast a vote against Puppydom not so long ago, but hasn’t bought one since partly for financial reasons and party due to not having time to actually read the nominees. But I’ve just bought one for Discon 3.

    And people should know that another Hugo nominee, Lindsay Ellis, has been getting attacked by the Winterfoxen for no reason (check out her latest video on Youtube, “Mask Off,” seriously) — and the Winterfoxen have indicated they want to “go after” yet ANOTHER Hugo nominee, Jenny Nicholson, “next.” I think if the Hugo voters don’t decisively reject the Winterfoxen in the same way they rejected the Puppies, the Hugos will end up becoming a platform for political grievance as they did once before, instead of a celebration of science fiction, fantasy, and fandom, as they should be.

    None of this addresses the issue of the title of Lurhs’ blog post or whether it’s a violation of the Discon 3 CoC or not, or whether Discon should take it on themselves to redact the title of the post when referring to it. I think that it should stay on the ballot. I even think that the title should stay unredacted, as every time it is read in its entirety, the revulsion toward it will only grow, and ensure that it ends up well below No Award in December, as it deserves. It ought to be good for Discon’s financial health too — all those new supporting memberships! I do not doubt for a second that there are fewer Winterfoxen out there than people who want to keep performative gamesmanship out of the Hugos. So by all means, keep using the full title of the blog post. Splash it everywhere. And let’s see what happens.

  25. @evilrooster

    Were you under the impression that the haymakers have only been going one way..?

    I’m just going to point out before leaving this sore spot that here is where the disagreements are happening because here is where people with different opinions are actually talking to each other. Seems like the perfect place to hash out whether, and how, category might, or might not, need to change. But, again, you’re welcome to go elsewhere yourself; no-one’s forcing anyone.

    (After the time I saw Twitter decide that a File770 thread consisting almost entirely of “wow that guy sure is a jerk” was in fact a vociferous defence of that jerk I stopped paying attention to Twitter’s opinion of this place. YMMV.)

  26. @evilrooster

    perhaps not to sling unfounded accusations around about others?

    Beyond foundation there is evidence. As I said in the post. People should read the article itself although I should obviously prefer that it wasn’t necessary to expose more people than necessary to something I think is obnoxious.

    There is a concept in English law so obvious it has to be given a pompous and pretentious Latin translation “Res Ipsa Loquitor”. Literally “The Thing Speaks for Itself”. (I admit I’ve always wanted to use the latin phrase and this is probably my only chance, sorry)

    Fans have often said how much they’ve enjoyed nominees in that category. They’ve been moved to find out more about their favourite writer or their favourite sub genre. They’ve enjoyed something funny or witty or they’ve come across some fascinating new knowledge. Which of these does the article do? What arguments does it refute? How many people had their worldview changed by its empathic tone? What part of our hobby does it add joy to?

    It was intended to demean one particular person and it was intended to anger anyone who had sympathy for that person. That’s blindingly obvious to anyone who reads it. It was intended to do exactly what it did. If it didn’t cause that intended effect then it was a failure and shouldn’t be nominated. If it succeeded in that then it’s a CoC violation.

    Note: that I still think it shouldn’t be sanctioned under the CoC because George R R Martin is a “Public Figure” within fandom. My position is that Discon should make it clear that they neither sanction not approve it.

    The same argument applies to the nominations. As current fans they’ve been unfortunate enough to see these debacles before. They are adults and they knew exactly what they were doing and they knew exactly what would happen. They knew the article was harassment and they knew that nominating it would increase that harassment. “The thing speaks for itself” and in this case it speaks extremely loudly.

    In some ways I’m more annoyed with the nominators than the author I can see that she has a worldview that would cause her to write the article. The nominators, if they should succeed in getting her to win, would link her name to this forever and I don’t think it is going to age well.

  27. rcade: It isn’t pointless drama to have a stake in how the title’s presence on the ballot makes us look…

    I have the strangest impulse to quote a character from Diff’rent Strokes, even though your name isn’t Willis.

    Neither the title nor the blog post itself makes anyone who didn’t write it or nominate it look any way in particular, anymore than Safe Space in a Rape Room or Chuck Tingle’s fictional oeuvre did. At most, as a collective, we can take some responsibility as Hugo nominators for not reading or nominating enough of what we might have liked to see in this category. Or not. That part is completely optional.

  28. I’m sure the people who have had those haymakers land on them, or watched them land on others, will totally want to come back here for said conversation.

    You’re being pretty sanctimonious for someone who is talking about this subject on Twitter, which in my opinion is a miserable place to have a difficult conversation about SFF (or anything else, really). If that’s your “wider community” which sets your expectations for what is welcoming, you can keep it.

  29. As I said, people are perfectly welcome to have whatever discussions they wish wherever they wish. But if a discussion happens here – and I hope it does – here’s where I will be. Whatever the people elsewhere have decided File770 is – I don’t recognise it, I don’t agree with it, and I don’t care to abandon people and a space I like because of what someone else has decided is true.

    Every time I nudge a toe onto Twitter I seem to end up getting blocked by half a dozen TERFs (where do they all come from??), anyway, so as far as I’m concerned File770 is much less stressful for me

    (And most of our more, ah, testy regulars and semi-regular visitors like me just fine so far as I know, but they aren’t against shoving my opinions back down my throat if I say something they think is egregiously stupid or wrong, so it’s not like I’m lalalaing my way through the comment section with an invisible forcefield around me.)

  30. Neither the title nor the blog post itself makes anyone who didn’t write it or nominate it look any way in particular …

    I appreciate a 1970s sitcom reference as much as anybody, but I disagree with this statement. It’s going to be an embarrassment every time DisCon uses the full title of that work and every time it gets mentioned in the press and it will reflect on all of us collectively as participants in the Hugos.

    I sometimes recruit people who read SFF but aren’t in fandom into joining Worldcon as supporting members to be a part of the Hugos. The title of that work makes that less likely for me this time around.

  31. Twitter is not my only online community; thanks for not asking.

    But one of the advantages of Twitter is that no one is under the illusion that it’s friendly when it’s actually not. Mind you, Twitter is not a unitary thing; one builds one’s own community by curating a group of mutuals, then occasionally thrashing the algorithm when it tries to mess with the timeline.

    But I wouldn’t posit it, or any one singular place, as the place to have a discussion. I’m more just…disappointed, because F770 used to be a more pleasant place to be than it has been this last iteration. For me, at least; your mileage clearly does vary.

  32. rcade: It’s the whole point of the title and the essay: YOU ARE TERRIBLE, YOU HURT PEOPLE AND I WANT YOU GONE.

    You’re very disingenuous. Especially when we get to your next quote…

    This is a great place to do that once everybody wears themselves out from throwing haymakers and the discussion transitions into the argument afterparty.

    Maybe you should stop throwing haymakers?

    You, JJ, and Easterbrook all rest your arguments on gross exaggerations of what’s going on.

    If y’all can’t make your arguments based on reality, then maybe y’all should not make arguments?

    If you have to make up positions such as “GRRM is a uniquely evil monster” or “GRRM is a malevolent influence on fandom and must be driven out” to get angry about, then you’re not actually angry at reality. You’re angry about a bullshit fantasy that exists only in your head.

    Which… Sounds like a personal problem.

  33. @evilrooster

    For both EBH and Lodestar I was aware of a few different places the discussion was going on, and I’m sure that any discussion about BRW will be the same and equally sure that I’ll at least lurk elsewhere, although generally speaking I only really have the spoons to join in in one place at a time. I’m not the one who tried to shut down the possibility of it happening anywhere I didn’t approve of. ¯_ (?)_/¯

    (/prays to the wordpress gods that none of the shrug emoji characters are blocked)

    (ETA: /shakes fist at the wordpress gods, impotently)

  34. George has done far more to help protect fandom from the true racism, misogyny, and general other-ism out there than Natalie Luhrs has ever done, or, in my opinion, is ever likely to do.

    A) good works don’t negate bad behavior
    B) who has done more good works is irrelevant
    C) your personal opinion on the character of GRRM or Luhrs is also irrelevant

    Lindsay Ellis didn’t get attacked “for no reason” . She made a dumb comment and instead of just saying “hey, that was dumb” she doubled down on it, which lead people to start discussing her other dumb comments (like shipping Harriet tubman with the person who enslaved her), which led to her deleting her entire account, then came back with a feature length video on which she will be handsomely paid for.

    In another conspiracy theory being brought out into the light, now we have “the Winterfoxen” with some malevolent plan to harass people off of the Hugo ballot? Or the internet? rolls eyes

  35. If y’all can’t make your arguments based on reality, then maybe y’all should not make arguments?

    You’re tiresome as hell. Instead of taking your own position, such as explaining your interpretation of the Luhrs essay and why it doesn’t mean what Easterbrook and I think it means, you nip at ankles and tell us to shut up.

  36. rcade: It’s going to be an embarrassment every time DisCon uses the full title of that work and every time it gets mentioned in the press and it will reflect on all of us collectively as participants in the Hugos.

    Oh boy! More concern trolling.

  37. Sigh. Bad Meredith. Stop wasting spoons on making the same comment three times in slightly different ways and actually start working on the replies you owe from earlier – or at least figuring out whether you owe any, that’d be a good start…

  38. rcade:You’re tiresome as hell. Instead of taking your own position, such as explaining your interpretation of the Luhrs essay and why it doesn’t mean what Easterbrook and I think it means, you nip at ankles and tell us to shut up.

    Oh no! Rcade finds it tiresome as hell when people point out that rcade’s arguments are bad and based on things they made up!

    If you find someone asking you to base your arguments in reality to be “tiresome”, then you’re probably going to be tired a lot.

    My interpretation of Luhrs’s (please note proper spelling) essay is irrelevant to your gross exagerations of it. Your actions are your responsibility.

  39. img[src*=”75cd638ea3518227fec943852bd148d4″] + span::after,

    Add the Stylish browser extension, add Aan’s Plonk File Script, and edit the Code section to add the unique ID of the user in the gravatar image. Change the opacity style to 100%.

  40. rcade: “It’s going to be an embarrassment every time DisCon uses the full title of that work and every time it gets mentioned in the press and it will reflect on all of us collectively as participants in the Hugos.”

    I’m apparently immune to feelings of embarrassment for anything I haven’t done myself. YMMV, but I’d suggest it as a life skill to pursue. And I’m not being sarcastic, no matter how that sounds.

    Nearly every group of size has some version of a crazy uncle and as wide an arc as Worldcon members encompass, it can probably manage several before Thanksgiving gets too toxic. So, maybe if it bothers you when potential supporting members look askance, just shrug and say every family has at least one.

    Personally, I’m a little torn on this. I’ve read maybe 500 comments and while I can empathize with a lot of the commenters, still don’t have a strong feeling other than at least 31 people nominated it, so it belongs on the ballot, and it presents DisCon with an interesting question about CoC violations that will be almost impossible to navigate successfully, if you measure success by the nature of the outrage that meets your decision.

    Actually, I feel one other thing, but I want to think about it some more.

  41. Peeps, if someone refuses to make an argument, whether for or against something, you can’t force them, and there’s not much point repeatedly responding to the lack thereof. The only level of debate that lies down that road is an exchange of “nyah nyah you’re wrong, no YOU’RE wrong” repeated ad infinitum.

    @alexvdl

    My TBR pile can always do with the addition of something shiny, although at the rate I’m currently going it might (metaphorically, because ebooks) fall over and crush me ‘neath its weight before I get to everything: Read anything cool lately?

  42. evilrooster: Then I can understand why you don’t hang around here more. I do find what you bring is worth hearing.

    When I was put to work resolving tax controversies I found having had to survive the fannish marketplace of ideas was a great advantage, even if it had been a bruising education. Every time I had to write up a position I’d be thinking: How would PNH destroy this argument? How would Seth Breidbart undermine this logic chain? Is this explained as clearly as Mark Olson could do it?

  43. I’m apparently immune to feelings of embarrassment for anything I haven’t done myself. YMMV, but I’d suggest it as a life skill to pursue. And I’m not being sarcastic, no matter how that sounds.

    It’s not bad advice, but for me participating in the Hugos requires believing in the Hugos. The Gafiation Elf never leaves my shoulder, ready to convince me that a fan activity would be more fun not to do than to do. And it would save me $50 a year and I’d never have to think about best editors again.

  44. @meredith:

    You’re probably right that I shouldn’t expect spots to change. I remain hopeful, but shrugs

    The majority of what I’ve been able to read for the last year has been LitRPG stuff. Something about the emphasis on systems, both the creativity of them and how they break them just appeals to me. I don’t know if that’s up your alley.

    I also reread all of the written volumes of Scott Sigler’s Galactic Football League series. I get a lot more out of it now that I have gotten deeper into Crimson Tide fandom.

  45. I dunno, everyone who plays rough today was also around playing rough back in 2015 (and some people who played rough aren’t around anymore). I’ll grant you that there are plenty of people from then that I wish still posted as much now, though, and I’d be delighted if (… almost) everyone magically returned so we had more perspectives bouncing around (but I don’t post as much either – spoons, got none, etc). So, probably fair, I guess – but I still find enough value here for me to want to stay.

  46. @alexvdl

    I do enjoy reading opinions about LitRPG while I decide if I want to poke around the actual thing!

  47. Can’t understand how Stylish works on an android phone, how do I add the Plonk-script?

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