117 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/16/16 I’m Looking Over A Five-Leaf Clover”

1. ::ticky::

2. I loved Peter Ustinov on The Muppet Show.

3. (5) THE MAGIC NUMBER FIVE.
   If the Rabid Puppies are disciplined, their ~500 is more than the 5% threshold. I am not expecting three-finalist categories this year: either the increased nomination pool managed to come to a consensus or the slate voters fill out the five spots..

   (6) PRATCHETT MEMORIAL.
   In related news, Neil Gaiman has a bit more on the memorial (including hat), and also the “Good Omens” miniseries.

   (14) PLEONASM INSTRUCTION MANUAL.
   I’d be interested if it contained translations of the Chinese swearing. The Firefly actors’ attempts to speak Chinese were embarrassing.

4. [ticky]

   re: The 100, so they didn’t think about having the character go away briefly and return with a different actor? This is done on soap operas all the time, and the episodes of The 100 I saw did seem a bit like a dystopian soap opera.

   Also: fourth!!

5. First fifth !

6. Too tired to stay awake to be second fifth. Took the foster dog to a new foster home, which is likely to be foster-to-adopt if/when Alice finally gets released for adoption.

   It’s good for Alice.

   I’m relieved to only have my own dogs now.

   And it’s still really, really emotional to take such a nice dog to another home.

7. (6) PRATCHETT MEMORIAL. – Goddamn ninja-cutting onions*

   *= Decided this was too good to correct.

8. In related news, Neil Gaiman has a bit more on the memorial (including hat), and also the “Good Omens” miniseries.

   “Would you like a hug?”

   *sob*

9. Ninth. Just before second fifth. Time for sleep. It’s what you do after surgery.

10. Second fifth.

    (9) So the actress was going to leave, fine… that didn’t mean they had to kill off the character right after happy first sex.

11. Generation Beyond includes a real-life Mars Experience Bus that will travel the country providing student riders with an interactive experience simulating a drive along the red planet’s surface. The Lockheed Martin Mars Experience Bus is the first immersive virtual reality vehicle ever built and replicates 200 square miles of the Martian surface. The Mars Experience was built with the same software used in today’s most advanced video games.

    What could possibly go wrong?

12. The first rule of Pleonasm Club is the first and foremost of the principles and instructions that regulate and guide the behavior of Pleonasm Club members that make up its ranks.

13. (9) So the actress was going to leave, fine… that didn’t mean they had to kill off the character right after happy first sex.

    I suspect that there would have been a fair amount of grumbling about why are you writing X out just because she’s come out? You’re pandering to hate groups like 1 million moms!.
    Not as much, I grant you.

14. (9) THE 100 ANGERS LGBT FANS.

    I’ve not been following The 100 closely, but IIRC, didn’t the Lexa character have some sort of AI implant in her neck which partially controlled her personality? So the writers just need to transfer this AI to a new character and voilà, Lexa is back in the body of a new actor, ready to continue her relationship! Problem solved. (This screenwriting lark is easy – wonder if I could make a living at it?).

    In other news: Yay! Boaty McBoatface has won the poll to name the research ship.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-36064659

    Over to you, NERC. They can’t ignore the collective will of The Internet, can they? Or will the Sekrit Kabal which controls NERC impose their own winner, as the voters are obviously Wrongvoters having Wrongfun? (RRS Patrick Nielsen Hayden, anyone?).

    I personally like ‘RRS It’s Bloody Cold Here’. Not only is it apt for a polar research vessel, it also sounds like a Culture ship name.

15. (9) Not to worry, the showrunners will be bringing in three or four more lesbian characters to kill off.

16. That M John Harrison interview is excellent. I particularly like the idea that writing and publishing a book is set to become just another genteel accomplishment.

17. FYI, I think Cheryl’s speculation significant, as she is well-tied in.

    My 93%? ( don’t quite remember but it was up there) correct final guess ballot from last year was based, at least partially, on just this kind of thing.

18. 14ish) For folks with an interest in language design: The Forgotten Secret Language of Gay Men:

    Polari is a language of, in linguistic professor Paul Baker’s words, “fast put-downs, ironic self-parody and theatrical exaggeration.” Its vocabulary is derived from a mishmash of Italian, Romani, Yiddish, Cockney rhyming slang, backslang—as in riah to mean “hair”—and cant, a language used by 18th-century traveling performers, criminals, and carnival workers. Many of the words are sexual, anatomical, or euphemisms for police.

19. Re: Polari. I remember a character in classic Dr. Who (a Third Doctor episode) talking to the Doctor in that way, since he pegged the Doctor for being a traveling conman like himself. The Doctor was mightily confused with the speech (this was before the Tardis circuits codified such things), but if you think about it, the character was pretty on-nose with that…

20. @ Ghostbird:

    That M John Harrison interview is excellent. I particularly like the idea that writing and publishing a book is set to become just another genteel accomplishment.

    Hmmm. On the one hand, self-publishing combined with the current middle-class regard for creative self-expression would seem to point that way: it isn’t that far, in cultural terms, from “everyone can” to “everyone should.” On the other hand, writing a novel is a lot harder and more intense than most of the things the Victorian upper classes considered accomplishments. It’s not something that one can do passably enough to entertain one’s friends after a few weeks or months of lessons. And Victorian accomplishment culture depended upon the existence of a leisure class, and leisure is one thing that the beleaguered middle class of today doesn’t have in great measure.

21. @jonathan Well said. “Publishing” is now something that’s open to almost anyone, not merely the monied. (Being read, of course, is another matter, and very few people can be doing it these days for any kind of glory.)

22. Speaking of Damien G. Walter, I’ve been reading his “fisking” of the anti-Rey screed by that fundamentalist dude that was viral last week, and it strikes me as a textbook example of why “fisking” so often sucks. The original piece is bad, but also repetitive, which means the formal structure of “fisking” means that Walter’s response is also repetitive. And since much of the original piece is merely hortatory, much of Walter’s “fisking” amounts to saying, “Nuh uh!” over and over and over. It degenerates into increasingly strained attempts to be hilariously scornful.

    The “fisking” genre had a basically illegitimate birth, which it has never really overcome.

23. @Jacob Edelstein I take both your points, and I’d add that writers have been complaining that there are too many books and not enough readers since at least Roman times.

    On the other hand, #NaNoWriMo keeps breaking out everywhere(*), partly because it re-frames the work of writing as more like physical fitness than self-expression. And as the existing middle classes get demoted to petit bourgeoisie I can see publishing a book joining (say) giving a TED talk, managing a startup, or kickstarting a charity as the mark of someone who matters.

    (*) I get the impression it may be going out of fashion again, but it may just be that I’ve muted all the tags.

24. Most of the time it seems like neither NaNoWriMo nor self-satisfied sneering at NaNoWriMo will ever go out of fashion.

25. (12) Another assertion that it’s the science-fiction writing community that organizes the Hugos? Or just a claim that it tried, and failed, to seize control.

26. HOLD ONTO YOUR KAIJU! The United States and Japan are both in Blu-Ray Region A, which means any disc made in Japan will work on an American player and vice versa. But Japanese Blu-Ray prices are grossly over-inflated — a single disc with three episodes of an half hour anime, for instance, goes for about $80 in Japan. As such it’s cheaper, even with shipping costs, for the Japanese to order Blu-Rays off Amazon.com. When Blu-Ray first launched, this hurt Japanese anime sales enough that production companies refused to authorize American Blu-Ray releases until six months or more after the Japanese discs came out.

    Very likely this is why the American company is only listing a DVD version of Godzilla (Japan is Region 2 and the US Region 1). A Blu-Ray version probably won’t be available in the US until a year after the film’s theatrical release at the earliest.

27. They had a lottery for tickets for Pterry’s farewell gig, which sadly I did not win. In the olden days the Barbican would let you watch performances on screens in the foyer, but that seems to have withered on the vine.

    Nowadays the most exciting aspect of the Arts Centre is watching them plumb new depths in furniture; gone are the incredibly comfortable leather couches. The most recent replacements I’ve noticed are grey plastic chairs which are impossible to sit on for more than two minutes; these would be great for a fast food place, but not hugely successful if you are paying homage to Culture, or at least the bit of Culture which involves paying vast sums of money for theatre/concert tickets…

28. David Goldfarb: The first rule of Pleonasm Club is the first and foremost of the principles and instructions that regulate and guide the behavior of Pleonasm Club members that make up its ranks.

    Beautiful. Now I’m curious about the other rules…

29. @Jim Henley Yes, I’m sorry – I could have put that better. Say rather the popularity of NaNoWriMo shows it’s possible to celebrate the effort and discipline in writing instead of just making it a barrier.

30. @ Ghostbird

    And as the existing middle classes get demoted to petit bourgeoisie I can see publishing a book joining (say) giving a TED talk, managing a startup, or kickstarting a charity as the mark of someone who matters.

    Publishing a book is already considered the mark of someone who matters, hence the thriving market for ghostwriters.

31. So, I haven’t been around much the past few days. I’ve been reading.

    [Content note: OH, JOHN RINGO, NO!]

    Specifically, I accidentally started John Ringo’s “Black Tide Rising” series of zombie apocalypse books. (I had ’em loaded, was scrolling through my list to see what I wanted to read next, and the reader misinterpreted a “next page” gesture as an “open this one” touch. Okay, not intended, but first in the series… might as well.) I’m a couple of chapters into the third book at present, and I’ve had my first major “OH JOHN RINGO NO” moment.

    I know John well enough that we recognize each other on sight; he lives across town. I’ve read most of his past work and generally liked ’em okay, but there’s a certain “mental filter” I put in place when reading his books. It’s kind of like how I remind myself to judge Heinlein’s work in the light of when he was writing, but in John’s case I know to expect conservative politics and a bit of bondage with the obligatory gun worship. Factor it in right up front.

    As zombie fiction goes, Book One was pretty good. The science and protocols look solid, a definite plus. The idea that both daughters are hypercompetent – 15-year-old Sophia is a sniper and skipper, and 13-year-old Faith is the melee combat monster – strains credibility, but other characters are skeptical of their competence until they see it firsthand. John knows he’s presenting something unusual and takes steps to depict it as such. Cool. I have more of a problem with Faith being six feet tall, able to kick ass in a hundred pounds of gear for hours on end, and hot enough to have All The Mens lusting after her. But okay, one physically precocious character… whose opinions on fighting are enough to make anyone with testes and a military record propose marriage on the spot. To which she responds with a crack about how 14’s the Legal Marrying Age in some state, and if they’ve cleared that state in time for her 14th birthday, she’ll consider the possibility. Um, ew.

    But that’s not the OJRN moment. Nor was the Book Two incident where a staff sergeant takes refuge with four other men and one “split” (his term for a woman) whom he calls a “cock-tease” before advising her to volunteer for sex before they lose control and rape her. (And he’s a good guy?) Or the fact that whenever opposite-sex survivors are stranded together, every fertile women is pregnant by the time they’re rescued. Even basic math gets abused; will someone please tell me how, when awards are getting handed out toward the end, “six plus one” is the same as “five and three” and adds up to six? Or how they make an award for participating in the formation of “Wolf Squadron” and don’t give it to the guy who did it, despite giving him a Silver Star for doing that very thing? Maybe I should blame Baen’s editing team…

    No, Book Two was just too preachy and boring. There’s way too much time spent on the bureaucratic details of Let’s Make This A Real Military, complete with paperwork, imposing military discipline on complete civilians, finding legal justifications for giving the kids commissions all nice and proper… as if that’s the most interesting story to tell about fighting zombie hordes on islands and the high seas. Sheesh.

    Then I hit Book Three, home of the OJRN moment. In Chapter Two, Sophie’s boat rescues two kids in a life raft: one seventeen-year-old boy and one “just turned twelve” girl who is very pregnant. They insist that “nothing happened,” and the Moment is when the sole male crewmember on the boat speaks up:

    “It is nearly impossible for a man below a certain age to do ‘nothing.’ Pressures build, especially around a beautiful young lady. Pain occurs and, in fact, if ‘nothing’ is done actual damage can occur.”

    Set aside the fact that this guy – who has to be around sixty, thus five times her age – has slyly changed “doing nothing” from the kids’ meaning of “no sexytimes” to cover any event that releases sperm. Ignore as well that he believes men can suppress nocturnal emissions.

    No, the Moment was when he referred to an eleven-year-old girl as “a beautiful young lady.” Remember, she just turned twelve – that’s explicit in the text – and is nearly ready to give birth. That means she was barely eleven when they ended up in the raft together. This perv didn’t credit a teenaged boy with being able to control himself around a barely-pubescent child while they were fighting to stay alive. Couple that with all the marriage proposals 13-year-old Faith is getting, the sub crews ogling 15-year-old Sophia while she gets an all-over tan (“They tell me I have to wear clothes now that I’m an officer. It’s a pain.”), and there’s a definitely squicky pattern developing. It doesn’t help that, a few pages later, the CDC and Sophia’s dad both confirm Crewman Geezer’s prescription: the girl needs to start having sex, at least once a day, to make her delivery easier. OH, JOHN RINGO, NO!

    I haven’t thrown a book in a long time. I may start with this one, at least in the figurative sense. (It is electronic.) Yes, all of those weird pregnancy-related facts may check out; in fact, I trust John enough to credit him with doing the research to verify them. But the incident isn’t necessary. Or, at least, it doesn’t appear to be so far. Maybe it’s setting up a plot point that will develop later on… but somehow I doubt it. It looks more like an excuse to show off Weird Biology At Work with a side of No, Really, They Have To! that a good editor should have cut.

    Look, there was some dodgy stuff in the “Paladin of Shadows” books, but at least the women there were physically mature and so jaded their skin must’ve been green. This series is getting waaaaay too close to pedophilia for comfort. Next time I see John, I may have to give him a very vocal OJRN and ask what the hell he was thinking.

32. (5) THE MAGIC NUMBER FIVE:

    Honestly I’m actually really fond of the 5% rule. I think there’s a big problem with the lack of cohesion in some of the categories that needs to be acknowledged. The 5% rule is where that acknowledgment actually happens.

    I mean, let’s reduce ad absurdum: if in a particular category 1000 people nominate, and some candidates get in on the strength of 10 nominations (1%), then… is that what we want to recognize and celebrate as best-of year? Something that got ten nominations, not just five? If a few authors get their immediate family to nominate them, is one better than the other because he’s got another two siblings?

    If the numbers go low enough, then they become a pretty pitiful basis for an award.

    Yes, we’ve got an immense field out there. Yes, we’ve got a navigability problem. The solution isn’t lowering the bar to the point where the award becomes “Most Statistically Insignificant Clustering.”

    Keep the 5% rule. Nominations yielding a shortlist supported by only a tiny fraction of the nominators is an indicator of something not quite right with the award; that there aren’t enough candidates which have gained enough popularity to be meaningful candidates. And, hey, keep the rule, and maybe authors, reviewers, editors, and fans of every stripe will have a little more incentive to find more effective ways of focusing our attention.

33. @Rev. Bob:

    Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed rape *barfs*

    I’ve read enough about OJRN to know that I will not touch one of John Ringo’s books with a 100-foot clown pole. Thanks for the reinforcement.

34. @Rev Bob

    After reading the first Paladin of Shadows book, and hearing about the rest of the series, I’ve long considered John Ringo a prime example of a creep with enough friends vouching for them, a creep who knows the right people, and is thus allowed to keep on being creepy.

    And it’s not his politics; I’ll call Mote in God’s Eye a great novel in spite of how hard right it is. It’s that Ringo’s view of women as sexualized pray in all situations, and his glorying in the characters who are the predators, are barbaric. Moreover, when you look at his published reasons for writing Ghost. Without the veiling of knowing him personally or professionally, Ringo’s oeuvre is one giant series of red flags, even without Watch on the Rhine.

35. @Dawn:

    I’m perfectly aware that there’s nothing magical about reaching one’s eighteenth birthday. There’s a sixteen-year-old girl I’ve seen at a couple of local cons who looks like she’s twenty-something and apparently has the sexual history to match. I was certainly interested in women by the time I was that old, and I was in no way unique.

    But I wasn’t interested in girls five years younger than I was, let alone those who hadn’t finished puberty. Put me in a lifeboat with one, and I’d be too busy worrying about where our next meal was coming from to think about sex.

    I mean, the way Ringo sets up the incipient baby boom in Book One, it kind of makes sense. He’s talking about adults holed up with supplies. Food and shelter are basically taken care of, there’s no reading material, you run out of things to talk about… okay, I can see recreational sex coming up as an option. An unwise one – you should be conserving that energy! – but understandable.

    That’s a far cry from two starving kids on a life raft.

36. @Jim Henley: I would question whether the activity of “fisking” ever had a determinable beginning. I know that the term originated with people doing line-by-line refutations to the writings of Robert Fisk, but other people had been doing similar line-by-line refutations to posts on Usenet for years before that.

37. @Ghostbird:

    Yes, I’m sorry – I could have put that better. Say rather the popularity of NaNoWriMo shows it’s possible to celebrate the effort and discipline in writing instead of just making it a barrier.

    Thank you. Ironically, I think it’s professional writers that are more apt to make writing sound like a physical-fitness routine, with good reason. It really is important for someone who wants to be that to establish a routine and meet goals and break through plateaus.

    Apparently there’s a documentary about the Eagles in which Glenn Frey talks about wanting to be a songwriter but not being quite sure what that means. And he moved into an apartment building where his downstairs neighbor was this guy named Jackson Browne, and every day he could hear Jackson Browne get up, put on a pot of tea, and then sit down at the piano and start making noises with it. And he realized: that’s how.

    For those of us who do NaNoWriMo, creativity can be more like adventure-tourism, an annual special occasion. Still worth doing on its own terms, but the lack of the every-dayness all-year – the fitness-routine aspects – of it is what separates us from the working writer.

38. @TYP: “I’ve long considered John Ringo a prime example of a creep with enough friends vouching for them, a creep who knows the right people, and is thus allowed to keep on being creepy.”

    Do not confuse the man with the books.

    There is a difference between imagination and reality, especially when your job is to make up stories. The author of a series of gruesome crime novels is not secretly murderous; one must be wary of confusing the characters with the author. Many stories need a villain, and that means the author has to find a way to get into their head to be able to write them properly.

    Ghost‘s main character might be seventeen kinds of creepy, but how does that make John a creep? Is Thomas Harris a creep for inventing Hannibal Lecter? Is Joss Whedon a psychopath for coming up with Angel and Spike and Drusilla?

    At worst, all the evidence I have suggests is that John’s come up with some creepy ideas to put into his books. Whether they’re complete fabrications or deep dark fantasies… is that really relevant if he’s not acting on them? I could come up with a story about a serial killer who chops up preteens and describe the murders in hideous detail – but it doesn’t mean I have the slightest degree of ill will towards kids.

    I should, perhaps, note that the OJRN incident I mentioned above is responded to (mostly) appropriately by the other characters. The female crewmembers don’t buy his “immaculate conception” theory and are practically ready to hang the boy until one of them examines the girl, and nobody’s comfortable with the idea of her having sex – with the boy or anyone else. (Is there some reason it has to be Real Organic Sex and not a substitute item? I’d expect at least one of the women to ask that, since the purpose seems to be simple penetration…) The pregnancy is presented as a messed-up situation all the way around, as it should be. My problem is with the decision to put that in the book in the first place, to let it go to print that way, and with Crewman Creepy’s description of the girl. (Truth be told, at this point I almost wouldn’t be surprised if Creepy’s actually the Kildar in disguise.)

39. @Joshua K:

    @Jim Henley: I would question whether the activity of “fisking” ever had a determinable beginning. I know that the term originated with people doing line-by-line refutations to the writings of Robert Fisk, but other people had been doing similar line-by-line refutations to posts on Usenet for years before that.

    Heck, I myself had done it on Usenet. But that may simply state another aspect of the problem. That is…

    1. There is doing an interlineated quote-response sequence to someone else’s work. This can itself be problematic since sometimes you’re destroying context when you slice the original piece up like that, but when you don’t abuse your quote-power it’s an efficient use of the medium.

    2. There is the re-christening of this activity as “fisking” by the first generation of warbloggers who were impressed with the idea of ridiculing a working journalist for attempting to get inside the heads of the people he is writing about, even at his own expense. These people were both ignorant of internet history – as you say, it had been done – and proudly sociopathic besides.

    3. Finally there is the decision to locate your own work within the tradition of (2) rather than (1). That is, when you make a conscious decision to participate in the tradition of “fisking” as opposed to simply doing a quote-response sequence, you are practically begging to go wrong.

40. Standback

    Honestly I’m actually really fond of the 5% rule. I think there’s a big problem with the lack of cohesion in some of the categories that needs to be acknowledged. The 5% rule is where that acknowledgment actually happens.

    If the rule were something like “5% or 25 votes, whichever is fewer” I’d be okay. Otherwise, the non-linear way the power-law works means that if you get enough nominations, then nothing will meet the 5% requirement.

    So looking at 2014 Hugos Best Short Story category, the #1 nominee had 79 out of 865 votes. That suggests that if there were 2,900 organic (i.e. non-slate) ballots, even the #1 nominee would fail to get 5%.

41. Rev. Bob on April 17, 2016 at 9:30 am said:
    OH, JOHN RINGO, NO!

    Just a confirmation on the squick of it all.
    I mean, stop a moment and think: why all the middle school survivors?
    It’s not as if early adolescence is a time of great strength, skill, or knowledge, male or female.
    Is there any logical reason for so many young female survivors, as opposed to, say, twenty-something female combat veterans, or thirty-year-old women truckers who know about living rough, or forty-year-old retired Olympian target shooters, or even tough-as-sin ladies in their sixties with decades of roller derby mayhem in their pasts?
    There is an unhealthy fascination with the barely pubescent female, especially considering that this isn’t YA territory, and it is not written so that readers will identify with these young women, but rather objectifies them, and specifically them.
    INote all the logical handwaving he has to do with thirteen-year-old Faith in order to explain her very existence.
    As a reader I would not only have to imagine zombies, I would also have to invest in believing in some kind of weirdly fetishized and eroticized child-soldier prodigy – my suspension of disbelief may start to flag at some point.
    But it really matters to produce legitimated illicit under-aged sexuality.
    I’d posit that Faith and the pregnant twelve-year-old are what it is really all about.
    The rest of the plot, zombies and all, is simply a way to find a situation which permits and justifies sexualizing these very young women.
    And, note, they aren’t seventeen or eighteen – arguably adult – they are firmly in schoolgirl mode.
    The whole purpose here is to argue yeah, maybe in everyday life you can’t just go around marrying or raping the underaged, but what about zombies!
    Just a really big NOPE.

42. @Greg:

    Don’t look at the #1 nominee; look at the ones downballot.
    “The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere” made it in with 43 nominations.
    Hoyt’s “Dog’s Body” missed the 5% with 38, and Liu’s “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel” is right behind with 37.

    I don’t think we can swing an amendment tying the cutoff to a power law, much as I might like to. And at the moment, 5% is awfully close to your proposal of 25. “One out of twenty people found this story noteworthy” is one thing; “The Hugos got another 2,000 nominators (15 of them for this one story, bringing it from 22 noms to 37)” is rather less of a recommendation.

    This isn’t an issue I’m very strident about; I’m not going “OMG how dare we recognize a work that’s clearly inferior to whatever does reach 5%-ish.” At the same time, the 5% rule serves a purpose which I appreciate. I think it’s foolish to say “Oh, the results we’re getting from that rule aren’t as nice as we wanted; let’s get rid of the rule.” Running up against the rule indicates a problem; getting rid of the rule masks the problem and seems likely to let things deteriorate in the long run.

43. (You know what’d be even MOAR tragic? If the Rabid Puppies take the whole ballot, and then the SAD Puppy picks take all the runners up, so we don’t even get awesome statistics from all the new nominators.)

    (…am I a little pessimistic this evening? Sorry ’bout that…)

44. Paul Weimer said:

    Re: Polari. I remember a character in classic Dr. Who (a Third Doctor episode) talking to the Doctor in that way, since he pegged the Doctor for being a traveling conman like himself.

    Yup, in “The Carnival of Monsters”. According to the text commentary on the DVD, the actor playing the carny actually knew Polari and added those lines himself (with permission from the director).

45. Rev. Bob on April 17, 2016 at 9:30 am said:

    It isn’t even the first time he’s used most of those. He did that in that series about the invading aliens (whose name I have forgotten). First book (‘Gust Front’): not bad (needed editing for continuity, and I got the feeling he didn’t think through some of his Cool Ideas), but, got tired of all the females being stacked and hypercompetent, including the ones that were under 16. Second book: more of the same, and you start getting his anti-commissioned-officer bias showing. Third book: the same crap, and the aliens, who are supposed to be slow learners, are learning much faster than the humans. I gave up on his writing at that point: he’s just not that good.

46. @Rev. Bob:

    Oh, nothing magical about eighteen at all! I knew some 13/14 year-olds in grade 8 who were bustin’ out all over. I have concerns about kids having sex with kids but I know it’s gonna happen. That’s why I’m all for real sex-ed including what informed consent is.

    As TYP said, it’s that notion of all girls who have reached menarche as fair game that really squicks me out. (I appreciate your clarification about the pregnant twelve-year-old.) And also the fact that grown men are lusting after 13-year-olds.

    (I remember my boyfriend telling me about that Awkward Boner-Killing moment when chatting up a woman and then realizing that she was over ten years his junior. She was technically legal, but that didn’t matter, it still felt wrong to him.)

    As for recreational sex when there’s nothing else to do? I once had a conversation with a young man from the Maritimes, and he told me that in his town there was nothing to do but drink/do drugs, B&E, and fuck. Probably some hyperbole there, but again, I have no problem with sex between consenting adults. None of this “you’d better have sex with us because otherwise we’re gonna rape you” bullshit.

    I don’t believe that only want one thing from women. I don’t believe that men can’t control themselves when it comes to sex. I do, however, feel like there are some people with a vested interest in promoting that viewpoint because it makes sexual assault so much easier. So I’m going to try to call bullshit whenever I see it.

    Ugh. I need a shower.

47. @Standback, re:the 5% rule,

    I kind of get where you’re coming from but I disagree. I think that the final ballot should have the full five finalists regardless of how many nominations a work got because I want to maximise the chance of a worthy winner. Choosing the winner from five is better than choosing the winner from three.

    Quite regularly the finalist with the most nominations isn’t the winner, so I don’t care much if a work makes it to the final ballot with fewer than 5% of the nominations; I care more about the winner. The field is now big enough that the 5% threshold is no longer a good rule: this year, I saw a lot of works others squeed about but didn’t get round to reading them myself, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

    If a category is so moribund that it attracts very few nominations, the fix is not the 5% rule. The fix is to get rid of that category.

48. What I recall Ringo saying about Ghost was that he’d written it to work through some of his own issues. I approve of that, just as I approve of people who write poetry for self-expression. Problem is that both kinds of writing usually produce stuff that is better left unpublished.

49. The fix is to get rid of that category.

    Or to refrain from nominating unless you really think you can identify the best [moribund category item] of the year. It’s an honor system. If you try to turn it into anything else, it won’t work.

50. I see… white spaces…

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