Pixel Scroll 5/29/18 The Future Is Pixelled, It’s Just Not Evenly Scrolled

(1) HUGO VOTER PACKET. Members can access the 2018 edition: “2018 Hugo Awards Voter Packet Now Available”.

Worldcon 76 has issued the 2018 Hugo Awards Voter Packet, a collection of finalists for the 2018 Hugo Awards made available to members of Worldcon 76 to assist them in making informed decisions when voting on this year’s Hugo Awards. The packet is available for download from the Worldcon 76 Hugo Awards website in the “Hugo Voter Packet” section. Members of Worldcon 76 can sign in using their Hugo Award voting credentials that were sent to them when the final Hugo Award ballot was issued.

Only members of Worldcon 76 can access the 2018 Hugo Award Voter Packet and vote on the 2018 Hugo Awards.

…Worldcon 76 will shortly send an announcement regarding the availability of the Hugo Voter Packet to all members who registered their e-mail address with the convention. This mailing will include a copy of the member’s voting credentials (membership number and voting PIN). Members can request a copy of their credentials using the 2018 Hugo Awards PIN lookup page.

A 1943 Retro-Hugo Voter Packet is in preparation.

(2) “SNAPE” MEMORABILIA TO AUCTION. You Alan Rickman fans should get ready to empty your money belts. Taryn Ryder, in the Yahoo! Entertainment story “Alan Rickman’s frustrations playing Snape in ‘Harry Potter’ revealed in personal letters” says the actor’s archive is about to be auctioned off by Neil Pearson Rare Books for 950,000 pounds, which includes many Harry Potter collectibles, including Rickman’s annotated copies of Potter scripts, as well as scripts for other films and plays Rickman was in, like Die Hard.

Rickman — who died of cancer in 2016  — helmed the role in all eight films from 2001 to 2011.

One letter is from producer David Heyman, who sent Rickman a thank-you note after 2002’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “Thank you for making HP2 a success,” it reads. “I know, at times, you are frustrated but please know that you are an integral part of the films. And you are brilliant.”

 

(3) MORE ON WISCON. From S. Qiouyi Lu. Thread starts here:

(4) CODES OF CONDUCT ELSEWHERE. According to Business Insider, “Programmers are having a huge debate over whether they should be required to behave respectfully to each other”. A lot of the objections are still current events in the Vox Popoli comment section, but not in most parts of fandom.

Last week, a software engineer publicly quit a very popular open-source project, setting off a firestorm of debate within the programming world.

Programmers are arguing about whether they should have to agree to a community code of conduct that requires them to behave respectfully.

They are also arguing about whether programs that aim to increase participation from underrepresented groups are “racism.”

The debate began on Wednesday when a developer named Rafael Avila de Espindola quit the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure Project, to which he had been a major contributor over the past decade.

Avila outlined several of his frustrations with the group but said he quit because it was requiring him to agree to a community code of conduct to attend its conference.

That code of conduct basically says the group is open to people from all walks of life and expects its members to be courteous.

Avila also said he was unhappy that the project had decided to accept an intern from a group called Outreachy, which offers paid internships to women, LGBTQ folks, African-Americans, people with Hispanic or Latin heritage, and those with indigenous American ancestries.

In other words, the internships are for people in underrepresented gender and racial groups in the programming/open-source worlds; white men and Asian men are the two groups best represented in tech, diversity reports have found.

…Despite that kind of rancor, large open-source communities and conferences are increasingly adopting community codes of conduct.

And for good reason — the open-source world has a reputation for aggressive, rude, and intimidating behavior.

In 2013, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the god of open-source programming, was called out for profanity-laced rants on the Linux email lists, which set the tone for the open-source world.

He and the Linux community did an about-face — sort of — in 2015, telling members that their work would be criticized but asking them to “be excellent to each other” and to feel free to report abuse.

(5) ERASURE FIGHTER. James Davis Nicoll’s personal Episode VII appears on Tor.com — “Fighting Erasure: Women SF Writers of the 1970s, Part VII”.

At this stage of James’ Tour of Disco-Era Women SF Authors, we have reached M. Certain letters are deficient in authors whose surnames begin with that particular letter. Not so M. There is an abundance of authors whose surnames begin with M. Perhaps an excess. In fact, there are more authors named Murphy than the authors I listed whose names begin with I….

Sondra Marshak is best known for her Star Trek-related activity. Star Trek, an American science fiction television show akin to Raumpatrouille—Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion, was cancelled after seventy-nine episodes in the mid-1960s. An anthology of original stories commissioned a decade after a show’s cancellation seems unthinkable and yet in 1976, Marshak and Myrna Culbreath’s co-edited collection, Star Trek: The New Voyages, was published by Bantam Books, soon followed by Star Trek: The New Voyages 2. This suggests that the show’s fandom managed to survive the show’s demise. Perhaps some day there will be a revival of this venerable program—perhaps even a movie!—although I must caution fans against getting their hopes up…

Fans of John Scalzi’s Redshirts may find the New Voyages story “Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited” of interest, as yet another example of science fiction authors independently hitting on very similar ideas.

(6) KGB. Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Mary Robinette Kowal and Lawrence C. Connolly on Wednesday, June 20, 7 p.m. at the KGB Bar (85 East 4th Street, just off 2nd Ave, upstairs) in New York.

Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of historical fantasy novels: Ghost Talkers, and The Glamourist Histories series and the forthcoming Lady Astronaut duology. She is also a three time Hugo Award winner and a cast member of the podcast Writing Excuses. Her short fiction appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science FictionTor.com, and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer, lives in Chicago. Visit her online at maryrobinettekowal.com.

Lawrence C. Connolly

Lawrence C. Connolly is one of the writers for the anthology film Nightmare Cinema, premiering next month at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. Produced by Mick Garris, the movie goes into wide release later this year. Connolly’s books include the Stoker finalist Voices (scheduled for re-release this summer), This Way to Egress, and Veins. More at LawrenceCConnolly.com.

(7) FUNDRAISER. Tessa B. Dick is trying to raise $5,000 through YouCaring to “Keep my home”. She’s got $4,205 in contributions as of this writing. Her May 28 update said:

I really need your help, or I am not going to make it. I don’t know how to explain that I can’t sleep because every time I close my eyes, I see that gang banger with a knife to a boy’s throat. I can’t go anywhere because every time I walk out the door, I see his gangster buddies coming after me because my testimony put their buddy in prison. I got crisis counseling and I coped for twelve years, but I can’t cope any more. I went through major forest fires in 2003 and 2008, a severe burn to my foot in 2007, a head injury in 2010, a broken leg in 2012, and more stress than I can describe. I got a settlement for the head injury that didn’t even cover my medical bills, which is why I had to go bankrupt.

I should qualify for disability, based on my severe weight loss alone, but they keep turning me down. My only hope is to get this house in good enough shape to get a reverse mortgage.

(8) GAME MAN. Rich Lynch was tuned into tonight’s Jeopardy! In the category “Award Winning Books” one of the answers was:

(9) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.

Crayola crayons’ distinctive smell — ranked 18th in a list of the 20 most identifiable  smells in a 1982 Yale University study — is largely due to the stearic acid used to make the waxy consistency. Stearic acid is a derivative of beef fat.

Source: Mental Floss

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY

  • Born May 29, 1906 — T.H. White, best known for his Arthurian novels including The Sword in the Stone

(11) COMICS SECTION.

  • JJ finds Tolkien and Middle-Earth deconstructed in Existential Comics’ “Council of Elrond”.
  • John King Tarpinian found one voter’s party preference was not all that surprising in Bizarro.

(12) THE OLD STOMPING GROUNDS. ExCeL, the site of the 2014 London Worldcon (aka Loncon 3), was the host site of MCM Comic Con this past weekend (25–27 May 2018). Newham Recorder has the story: “Superheroes and spandex squeeze into ExCeL for MCM London Comic Con”

Tens of thousands of pop culture buffs took a pilgrimage to the ExCeL this bank holiday weekend for the UK’s largest comic book convention.

…Monolithic entertainment brands seemed keen to continue cashing in on the nerd demographic, wheeling out a long list of stars for the event, including Black Panther’s Letitia Wright, The Defenders’ Rosario Dawson and Khary Payton and Cooper Andrews from zombie series The Walking Dead.

(13) MAINSTREAMING FAN REFERENCES. Karl-Johan Norén found a “Sign that the Hugo awards and sf fandom is, or at least is becoming, mainstream: we are used in a joke but not as the butt of it” in NewsThump’s headline “UK Brexit proposals nominated for Hugo Award in Fantasy category”.

(14) FINGERPRINTS ALL OVER IT. BBC reports “Fortnite sued for ‘copying’ rival game PUBG”.

The makers of Fortnite, one of the world’s most popular video games, have been accused of copying rival title PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG).

The studio behind PUBG has asked a court in South Korea to determine whether Epic Games copied its intellectual property.

Fortnite and PUBG have both attracted millions of gamers with their huge “last player standing” online battles.

Epic Games has not yet commented on the lawsuit.

PUBG was first released in March 2017. It was inspired by the Japanese thriller film Battle Royale, in which a group of students is forced to fight to the death by the government.

In PUBG, up to 100 players parachute on to an island, search for weapons and kill one another until only one player remains.

Fortnite was first released in July 2017 but its Battle Royale mode was not added until September 2017.

(15) WARPED TRUTH. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recently released a 2010 study document entitled “Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions” [PDF file]. The report was originally marked Unclassified, but For Official Use Only (U/FOUO) and was publicly posted by (among others) by KLAS-TV, the Las Vegas NBC affiliate (“I-Team: Documents prove secret UFO study based in Nevada”).

So, does the document provide a roadmap to a working warp drive engine? Probably not, according to at least one physicist. Quoting a Science Alert article “The US Military Has Released a Mysterious Report on ‘Warp Drives’. Here’s What Physicists Think About It”:

The authors suggest we may not be too far away from cracking the mysteries of higher, unseen dimensions and negative or “dark energy,” a repulsive force that physicists believe is pushing the universe apart at ever-faster speeds.

“Control of this higher dimensional space may b? ? source of technological control ?v?r the dark energy density and could ultimately play ? role in the development of exotic propulsion technologies; specifically, ? warp drive,” the report says, adding: “Trips to the planets within our own solar system would take hours rather than years, and journeys to local star system would be measured in weeks rather than hundreds of thousands of years.”

However, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who studies and follows the topics covered by the report, had a lot of cold water to pour on the report’s optimism.

“It’s bits and pieces of theoretical physics dressed up as if it has something to do with potentially real-world applications, which it doesn’t,” Carroll said.

“This is not crackpot. This is not the Maharishi saying we’re going to use spirit energy to fly off the ground – this is real physics. But this is not something that’s going to connect with engineering anytime soon, probably anytime ever.”

(16) THE VASTY FIELDS OF GALLIFREY. Io9’s James Whitbrook advises everyone about “The Best Stories to Watch During Twitch’s Absurdly Ginormous Classic Doctor Who Marathon”.

Today, Twitch begins a seven-week endurance run/celebration of all things old-school Doctor Who, live streaming over 500 episodes worth of adventures in Time and Space. Unless you happen to have seven weeks of free time starting imminently (in which case, I envy you), you likely can’t sit down and watch all of it. So here’s a few must-watch storylines to dive in for….

(17) ANOTHER BUYING OPPORTUNITY. From Mental Floss we learn: “An Original Doctor Who TARDIS Is Hitting the Auction Block”.

If you’ve ever wondered if there’s really something to this whole “dimensional transcendentalism” thing, a.k.a. the explanation given as to why Doctor Who’s TARDIS is so tiny on the outside but enormous on the inside, now’s your chance to find out for yourself. A TARDIS created for Peter Cushing for the 1965 film Dr. Who and the Daleks is getting ready to hit the auction block at Ewbank’s as part of its “Entertainment & Memorabilia” auction, which kicks off on May 31.

(18) DIVIDENDS. Absolutely true.

(19) INSTANT CLASSIC. Applause for Matthew Johnson’s latest filk in comments:

Also, for the Nick Lowe/Johnny Cash fans among us:

The beast of squees
Obsessed with old, forgotten Bonds
And whichever one you like
Is one of which he isn’t fond
God help the beast of squees

The beast of squees
Knows more than you on Doctor Who
Which host was better on Blue’s Clues
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might declare a Mary Sue
God help the beast of squees

Sometimes he tries to kid me
That he’s just a normal fan
Or even that he’s run right out of things to pan
I feel pity when I can
For the beast of squees

That everybody knows
They’ve seen him out in fannish clothes
Patently unclear
If it’s A New Hope or New Year
God help
The beast of squees

[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, John King Tarpinian, JJ, Rich Lynch, Cat Eldridge, Bill, Chip Hitchcock, Martin Morse Wooster, Carl Slaughter, James Davis Nicoll, Matthew Kressel, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

124 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/29/18 The Future Is Pixelled, It’s Just Not Evenly Scrolled

  1. @Darren Garrison–I thought we weren’t supposed to form negative judgments about anyone without fully hearing out the other side of the story.

    That must have been a horrifying experience for Yoon Ha Lee and his husband, but we don’t know anything at all about what motivated coffeandink to act. Genuine misunderstandings do happen, and child abuse is a real problem, more likely to be committed by family than strangers.

  2. Since Darren reposted the link to the full fananon thread here (which I found confusing and sprawling) about the Wiscon “killable bodies” panel, I’ll repost this write-up I found linked on that thread, which seems detailed and IMO makes it clearer why the audience was upset.
    https://sophygurl.dreamwidth.org/2572453.html

  3. Since Darren reposted the link to the full fananon thread here (which I found confusing and sprawling) about the Wiscon “killable bodies” panel, I’ll repost this write-up I found linked on that thread, which seems detailed and IMO makes it clearer why the audience was upset.

    And it seemed to me to show that the audience didn’t learn their lesson from Poe’s The Raven. They kept asking “Lisa” the same question over and over even thought they knew that they wouldn’t like hearing “Nevermore.”

    Several other audience members spoke up, giving Lisa a chance to clarify or backtrack what she said, but she kept repeating that she was trying to sympathize with Nazis and that the idea of Nazis being a form of killable body in video games was unethical because they were actual human beings vs. fictional races.

    Again, the panelist “kept bringing up Nazis” because the audience kept asking her about Nazis. And then they got mad because she didn’t advocate violence against protesters:

    At one point someone mentioned punching Nazis in real life, to which Lisa said “that solves nothing” – I know her stance on this was very upsetting to several audience members around me.

    The audience members around the blogger were “very upset” because she didn’t advocate violently attacking people that she disagreed with. (I believe I’ve been on the record here at File770 before saying that I don’t agree with punching people in the face for saying something that you disagree with.)

  4. @Darren

    People may have brought up a topic, but her opinions on that topic belong to her.

  5. Mark on May 30, 2018 at 2:43 pm said:

    People may have brought up a topic, but her opinions on that topic belong to her.

    So? What was she supposed to do? Say “I’ve answered that question once, so stop asking?” Or was she supposed to pretend to change her opinion to fit the audience? Here’s what I gather happened:

    Panelest gave her opinion.

    Audience: is that really your opinion?

    Panelest: Yes.

    Audience: Really?

    Panelest: Yes.

    Audience: Are you sure?

    Panelest: Yes.

    Honest?

    Panelest: Yes.

    Audience: She keeps bringing up Nazis!

  6. Darren Garrison: Stop making up evidence. It can’t possibly add to anyone’s understanding of what happened in that room.

  7. Darren, the problem cited wasn’t simply her “bringing up” Nazis, the complainants had issues with the content of what she said about them as well.

  8. Mike Glyer on May 30, 2018 at 3:16 pm said:

    Darren Garrison: Stop making up evidence. It can’t possibly add to anyone’s understanding of what happened in that room.

    I’m going by this:

    Several other audience members spoke up, giving Lisa a chance to clarify or backtrack what she said, but she kept repeating that she was trying to sympathize with Nazis and that the idea of Nazis being a form of killable body in video games was unethical because they were actual human beings vs. fictional races.

    Which fits what I said. So if anyone is making up evidence, it is the blogger who provided that description that I had to work from.

  9. Darren Garrison: I’m going by this:

    No, you’re not, because there’s no scripted dialog in that post, which is something you made up. I’ve made myself clear.

  10. @Arifel: Thanks for the breakdown! I’d already downloaded everything, but now I can delete some stuff (I’m short on disk space).

    That is a lot in Editor Short Form.

    I would like to thank whoever made all of Lady Trent available, b/c I read borrowed copies (and nominated the series both this year and last) and am thrilled to have copies of my own to croon over.

    Not even a sample of Black Bolt? Huh.

    @jayn: Thanks for that link. What the hell “different generation” is that person claiming to be from/use as an excuse?

    I am still not quite recovered from my exertions at Baycon, though I have to leave the house to get one of the credentials looked at. It is the price to be paid for eating and sleeping badly, drinking too much, and walking a lot and sitting in really hard chairs.

    The hotel was terribly disorganized b/c of remodeling, but luckily the con provided a list of restaurants that I grabbed, Charon spotted one that sounded good, and Heather volunteered her room and credit card for the delivery, so we had a WONDERFUL Indian dinner and lovely chat on Saturday night. A chaat chat, as it were.

  11. I am getting the “sorry that widget is no longer valid error” for the Divine Cities books on NetGalley too. Did anyone work this one out ?

  12. Elisa: I am getting the “sorry that widget is no longer valid error” for the Divine Cities books on NetGalley too. Did anyone work this one out ?

    A month or so ago I got an e-mail from a Marketing exec at Crown Publishing offering me an ARC of RJB’s upcoming novel Foundryside (probably because I linked my big File 770 review of the Divine Cities to the NetGalley preview I got of City of Miracles). I’ve e-mailed that person back, explaining the problem and asking if they’d be willing to pass it on to someone who would be able to fix it. I will let you know if I hear back.

  13. Thanks! I had a pre-existing account but only ever used it for a few children’s books I was reviewing for an award. I don’t think I have touched it in two years and never for any adult books. Odd.

  14. Anyone still getting the widget error, I just downloaded them. Two things (one already mentioned):

    #1 The link is bad because the line break in the middle of the text of the link means the link (apparently created automagically) doesn’t include the full URL. This was mentioned already, methinks.

    #2 When copying the URL, because of the line break, you will almost certainly get a space in the middle. Remove that before trying to follow the link. If I don’t remove the space (which doesn’t belong in the middle of the URL), I get the “widget blah blah” error. It’s a stupid error; it should say it’s an invalid link, not that it’s expired (which it hasn’t – truncate the URL at any arbitrary point and you get that message, it just means it’s not a valid magic ID in the last part of the URL).

    @JJ & others – hope this helps. If you’ve already removed the space and still get the problem, I don’t know what to say, sorry! 🙁 Nothing more frustrating than hearing “it works for me,” I know. 😉 But I hope tip #2 here helps, if anyone was just copying the 2-line URL into their browser and not removing the space you get from the line break.

  15. BTW I haven’t seen it mentioned (maybe in the previous thread? I’m catching up all around, sorry if this is redundant), but FYI Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine Complex is a PDF of 3 chapters and a note from her and a NetGalley link for the full book.

    BTW I’m getting EPUBs (yay) from NetGalley, not PDFs. I’m also seeing a “send to Kindle/protected MOBI” link (which I’m not using). It looks like Kuhn’s and McGuire’s ebooks will expire August 1st, while Bennett’s will expire August 20th.

  16. @Darren

    Wow–around 3/5ths of the way down that thread, I see a confusing, surprising, alarming, flabbergasting, frightening, and finally just damaging thing that coffeeandink did to Yoon Ha “Ninefox Gambit” Lee

    Holy what? Assuming Yoon Ha Lee’s facts in that story are true, unless coffeeandink’s side of the story is “actually, that wasn’t me who made the call,” I see no possible way they should be anything but reviled.

    ETA: reading more through the anonfail thread, I see someone else made a point pretty much the same as mine. Not me – I don’t post there. Just to clarify.

  17. When NetGalley says the book will expire, does that mean it goes POOF off your Kindle/epub reader?

  18. @Lurkertype–

    When NetGalley says the book will expire, does that mean it goes POOF off your Kindle/epub reader?

    It means the file will no longer open for you after that date. It will still be there but unreadable, until you delete it.

  19. My thoughts were that the Brexit document doesn’t qualify for Best Related Work because BRW is meant to be for non-fiction, and I’d rule the documents insufficiently related. Conceivably it’s Best Novel if it’s ruled to be fictional. Alternatively, the entire Brexit itself might be a Dramatic Presentation Long Form, since DPs don’t have to be fictional. (Something that made my head spin the first time I encountered it.)

  20. @lurkertype:

    The person in question is of my generation (I think a few years older than I am). That puts them on the young end of the baby boom.

    To calibrate that another way: my mother is spending her eighties as a volunteer Holocaust educator, having come here as a child refugee from Nazi Germany. This is not ancient history.

    (I am respecting OGH’s choice not to publish X’s name/identity on this site, but I’m not going to pretend not to know who they are.)

  21. @andyl

    I am also not a fan of PDF only as I find that more of a pain to read. I know I sound grumbly, it wasn’t so long ago that I would have been overjoyed to receive PDFs.

    First e-book I ever read was Doomsday Book in the early 1990s. It was in ASCII (or maybe RTF), and I did not have a laptop, so I spent several nights in a row hunched over my desk.

  22. @Stoic Cynic: Thanks for the “new cat dad” link. OMG CUTENESS (the cats & the dad’s reaction to them)!

    @Arifel: Thanks for the tip about “The Dead City”; yeah, the EPUB appears to be the whole volume, too. Cool, for those of you who don’t already own it. 😉 (I own it.)

    I was surprised “Escape Pod” included text as well as audio. Hmm, IMHO it would’ve made more sense to link to the web pages for the audio stories instead of including 225 MB of MP3 files, since “Escape Pod” is free on the web.

    John Joseph Adams always includes a lot of stuff. 🙂

    Note that a couple of Lee Harris-edited novellas are in the Best Novella folder in their entirety, though just excerpted in his Best Editor Short Form offering.

    Navah Wolfe isn’t the only one with samples of novels edited, BTW. Sheila Gilbert also did this (she did this last time, too). I believe she has excerpts of 20 or 21 of the 23 books she listed, if I counted right. I presume from the total page count that, like Wolfe, it’s short samples; regardless, I appreciate it.

  23. Vickie Rosenzweig: (I am respecting OGH’s choice not to publish X’s name/identity on this site, but I’m not going to pretend not to know who they are.)

    That request is no longer in effect — I was only asking people to wait for the name to be put forward by a witness (which happened) or the convention, rather than be the product of someone’s deduction from indirect evidence.

  24. From the writeup, it appears that during the entire panel, nobody really clarified what they meant by “Nazis”. In a game like Wolfenstein, there are certainly a vast number of characters explicitly espousing Nazi ideology. But there are also countless characters that you kill simply because they serve in the German army (and shoot at you). Did all the people talking about killing Nazis share the same idea of whether the second category counts?
    A number of people on my wife’s side of the family served in WWII (the generations on my side were spaced such that everybody was either too old or too young to serve in either world war), all of them for Germany. One of them was last heard of in the general neighborhood of Stalingrad. Another one lived to an advanced age, and I got to know him: In the final months of the war (I think he was not 18 yet), his mother thought it a good idea to send him from Switzerland where they lived back to her beloved Reich so he could “volunteer”. He trained for the U-boats, never saw action, spent some time in a French internment camp, where he eventually escaped rather than risk dying of starvation or disease (apparently he suffered some lifelong health issues from that camp stay).
    If his account was true (and I have no reason to think it wasn’t), I’d have a hard time thinking of him as a faceless killable minion, even though he undisputedly served in the army of a monstrous regime. On the other hand, his mother, though undisputedly a civilian, appears to have been a terrible person.

  25. @Darren Garrison: Wow, Lee’s experience sounds horrible and frightening. ::shudder::

  26. Lis Carey on May 30, 2018 at 1:37 pm said:
    @Darren Garrison–I thought we weren’t supposed to form negative judgments about anyone without fully hearing out the other side of the story.

    That’s what people, including the Wiscon concom, have been doing to Lisa Freitag.

    But I agree, it’s wrong.

    That must have been a horrifying experience for Yoon Ha Lee and his husband, but we don’t know anything at all about what motivated coffeandink to act. Genuine misunderstandings do happen, and child abuse is a real problem, more likely to be committed by family than strangers.

    This is a pretty horrible thing go say. Yoon Ha Lee and his husband have been investigated AND CLEARED. Coffeeandink risked a child to be taken from two parents who loved her, traumatising both the child and the parents. That’s something you do when you have real first hand knowledge of a problem, not because you’ve read on LJ something that made you suspicious.

    And btw, when YHL was really struggling with parenthood, another person offered to look after her child so as to give them some respite. That’s what you do when you actually want to help.

  27. I am in favour of punching Nazis: but I don’t think that refusing to endorse punching Nazis is the same as being one, or being complicit with them, or sympathising with them, or whatever pretzel logic you want to employ to accuse Lisa Freitag of “Nazi apologia”.

  28. Having reviewed Exhibits A (Lee’s story — omg what a nightmare) and B (witness’ batbrained statement that defendant claims she can’t level her WoW toons for ethical reasons because it involves torture), I’m leaning toward the plaintiffs. I hate being judgmental, it’s a lot of work. I also hate it when people equate pixel death with real-life-homicide, just one of my peccadillos.

    And for the record, I don’t believe in punching anyone, even Nazis. It’s mean, and you could cause serious injury. Unless they’re made of pixels, in which case anything goes, including ripping out their animated beating heart and taunting them with it, and beating them to death with their own severed (and animated) limbs.

    @Lurker That was indeed an epic feast, and they even had halwa (the lentil kind). It almost made up for the fact the Marriott lacked a restaurant, and a bar, and jacuzzi bubbles, and coherent wifi (and heat in the Cards Against Humanity room, at least for a while). Although they told me they’d have those things back next year. Fortunately there were plenty of cool people around, so I had fun anyway. Looking forward to the Fairmont for Worldcon — allegedly the South Bay has expertise in both WiFi and Indian food.

  29. @Anna Feruglio
    If Freitag had taken the position that she wasn’t comfortable with ANY depiction of any recognizable human group as an unindividualized uniformly evil mass target for guiltless aggression in a game or story, because it leads to dehumanization and thus more easy, thoughtless acceptance of violence against other humans, I could understand and sympathize with that. That position would lead to a rejection of all remotely realistic war games as well as games where Nazis manufacture zombies and whatnot, but I can’t say I’d miss them that much, never having been much good at them – I played the original original Castle Wolfenstein on an Atari 800, badly.

    Where I think she goes wrong is when she says that “her ancestors were Nazis and she was trying to understand them and sympathize with their choices.” (going by Sophygurl’s write-up, with the caveat that it may not be completely accurate, being a synopsis from memory).

    It’s an understandable impulse to want to think well of one’s family. But just as the vices of one’s ancestors don’t reflect poorly on yourself, your own virtues can’t retroactively redeem your ancestors. She argued with one of the panelists who said he did not sympathize with his own slave-owning ancestors. And the whole confrontation described with the panelist she apparently specifically confronted to ask whether he, as a gay man, would have agreed to serve in the Wehrmacht to save his own life from being sent to a concentration camp for being gay, is
    A) presenting a scenario that I don’t recall as being accurate to the period, and
    B) using that unlikely scenario to push him to agree with her that going along with the Nazis was the reasonable thing to expect.

    It does start to seem like special pleading, which is understandable if you’re operating under a sentimental attachment to your family and the desire to believe they did nothing really wrong. Which, for all I know, they didn’t. But if she DID start out as Wiscon says, positing that “that disabled or injured people sometimes “have to be sacrificed,”’ – that sounds like a program the Nazis actually did implement against the disabled.

    We don’t know the context of that remark – indeed, sophygurl doesn’t mention that part – perhaps she wasn’t there for it, didn’t hear it, or it wasn’t reported accurately. But if she DID say it, it DOES give the impression of agreement with part of Nazi ideology, very different from merely sympathizing with individuals who were obliged by circumstances to toe the Party line. If the panelist did say both those things: ‘sometimes it’s necessary to sacrifice the disabled’ AND ‘Nazis should be sympathized with’ (paraphrased) I could see why the audience might have had the impression that she was deliberately minimizing the wrongness of Nazi ideology, regardless of whether that was her intention or not.

  30. @Lis: Thanks. Effectively poof, then.

    @Vicki: My age, then. Which means she has no reason; indeed, seemingly fewer reasons, having grown up with people who fought actual Nazis.

    I read ebooks back in the day in plain old text and I prefer that over PDFs that you can’t adjust the size of. Which we had back in the 2013 packet — password protected, even. At least the PDFs I’ve looked at from this year’s don’t do that.

    @Kevin: I don’t think Brexit deserves Best anything for Hugos, even BDP Very Long. It’s just so implausible and lacks logical plot development and sympathetic characters. I could see it maybe being up for a Stoker, for horror non-fiction, but they might object on quality grounds as well.

    @Charon: I will accept your recs for food in future. You made a good choice. Maybe we can find non-lentil halwa. I wish some of the rest of the rooms hadn’t had heat; apparently the air conditioning ran off with the jacuzzi bubbles. At least there will be food within walking distance for Worldcon.

    @Stoic Cynic: I love #CatDad. What a delightful surprise.

  31. @Doctor Science … as a matter of fact, I am in negotiations with a Cat Nanny, a very old friend of mine who is agreeable toward tag-teaming the Big Kahuna. The Fairmont will only allow him there if a human is attending him at all times, and there’s only one of me, so I’m going to need some help, and she’s a professional animal wrangler. Depending on her schedule I might only bring him down for a day or two. I found a boarding place where he seems to get along with the humans, so I don’t mind leaving him there for a couple days. He likes the room with the fish tank and the trance music.

  32. @Anna Feruglio–You seem to be missing my point.

    We know that Yoon Ha Lee and husband were investigated and cleared, and that, it being a CPS investigation, it was terrifying and traumatic.

    We don’t know what happened on coffeandink’s end. There may have been a genuine misunderstanding, or the deliberately malicious act Darren wants us to envision.

    Darren engages in enough whataboutism and derailing that my distrust of having just one side of the story kicks into high gear when it serves his agenda so neatly.

    It’s quite possible coffeeandink made a horrible mistake based on wrong or badly misunderstood information, in which case I would expect she will feel horrible for approximately forever.

    Or it could have been a deliberate act of malice, in which case appropriate levels of guilt, while possible, can’t be as confidently hoped for, and one would hope karma will take a hand, since the law won’t.

    Regardless of which theory is correct, coffeeandink is not the only the primary, or in any way the most important source for what happened on that panel.

  33. Kendall: It’s a stupid error; it should say it’s an invalid link, not that it’s expired (which it hasn’t – truncate the URL at any arbitrary point and you get that message, it just means it’s not a valid magic ID in the last part of the URL).

    Yes, that’s what I would have expected, to get a 404 Error rather than a “widget is not valid” message.

    I tried it, removing the space, and it does allow me to download the books. I can only presume that the broken link for the 3rd book worked for me because I had already gotten a NetGalley version of that book a year and a half ago, and had reviewed it then.

    Thanks! 🙂

  34. @Anna Feruglio: When I mentioned apologists, I was talking about the societal context within which Freitag was making her comments. I was trying hard to think that maybe she’s just clueless and had no idea she was echoing the apologists.

    But because she was making the same arguments that they do, no matter how she got there, I’m not a bit surprised at the reaction.

    I hear that same special pleading all the time. It was a constant drumbeat when the calls to remove the Confederate tchotchkes was getting started.

  35. I am aspiring to have all the downloading wait-times and link issues that others report, but currently I haven’t succeeded in logging in to the Hugo packet site. (Filled in all my information from the voter e-mail, but clicking “login” does absolutely nothing.) Double-checked that JavaScript is enabled and everything. It doesn’t seem to be behaving like invalid login information. Maybe next week I’ll have the mental bandwidth to inquire about it. Or maybe whatever the issue is will have spontaneously fixed itself by then.

  36. @Joel Zakem: re Lucifer – I’d be interested to see what, if anything, they do with half-mask Maze from the what-if episode who seems much darker than regular Maze.

    Also I saw an article the other day (link lost to the mists of time, sorry) where the creator said he’d be interested in continuing with Lucifer as a comic. Would that be the first comic based on a tv show based on a comic spun off from another comic?

  37. @ Lis and Anna: having CFS called fro a frivolous or malicious reason is among my nightmares about my own kids, and has been done to friends of mine (by other people with vested interest in custody, shall we say, though not, IMO, the other actual parent as instigator.) No matter what coffeeandink’s reasons, that was a terrible thing to do to another family, especially on what appears to be minimal information. Lee’s own response to this seems well within reason for the affected parent.

    However, neither the people on fail.fandom nor Darren struck me as having Lee’s family’s interest in mind in bringing it up here and now. This:

    Darren engages in enough whataboutism and derailing that my distrust of having just one side of the story kicks into high gear when it serves his agenda so neatly.

    is a part of it , but so is pulling out someone else’s personal encounter as a gotcha game on an entirely different topic. Even if ONE out of multiple narrators of events is to be seen as untrustworthy because they did this, it negates no other points. With several different witnesses and reports on anything, it’s almost always possible to find someone who’s a jerk or a hypocrite or an anything else, it doesn’t automatically mean they are in the wrong.

    Of course, that works in reverse; I’m more middling now than I am on Wiscon’s side. I started thinking them in the right but am growing less sure… but every single time Darren posts, I swear I start wanting to defend them MORE. So clearly I have to remind myself the same applies here; his attitude does not invalidate the good points others have made.

  38. @Jayn

    It’s an understandable impulse to want to think well of one’s family. But just as the vices of one’s ancestors don’t reflect poorly on yourself, your own virtues can’t retroactively redeem your ancestors.

    But being blamed for the vices of your ancestors is precisely what often happens to people who happen to belong to a group that has done horrible things in the past. Your personal political stance doesn’t matter, what your actual ancestors doesn’t matter, how long ago it was doesn’t matter (the American Civil War was more than 150 years ago), you’re damned just by being a member of a group whose ancestors collectively did horrible things.

    I have been called a Nazi on the Internet quite a few times, just because I’m German. For the record, I’m not a Nazi and am very much opposed to Neo-Nazis. I’ve also been called hypocritical, because my ancestors were Nazis and I have no right to criticise anyone ever. One puppy type managed to call me both a Nazi and an crazy SJW leftist, which takes some doing. None of those people know anything about me or my family (and for the record, I have some Nazi ancestors and I’m not excusing them. I also have ancestors who were Nazi victims), they just see my nationality and make assumptions.

    And I wouldn’t be surprised if white Southerners weren’t regularly reminded that they are the descendants of slaveholders and that they’re probably racist, because their ancestors were. Whenever a major hurricane hits the Gulf coast, you get some otherwise nice and liberal people saying really horrible things along the lines of “they’re only getting what they deserve”, “I hope they don’t get any federal aid” and “maybe God will finally wipe Mississippi off the map” (actual comment I saw after hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf coast) and stuff like that. When called out, they often don’t even see the disconnect.

    This might well be why the panelist reacted as they did. Because “Nazis/Confederates are killable bodies” often turns into “you are a killable body, because you are descended from evil people”.

  39. Darren, thanks for posting the link to fananon. I was late coming back from lunch because I was so involved in reading the comments.
    I was struck by the poster who described this situation as partly the responsibility of the moderator as it is the moderator’s responsibility to keep the discussion on topic and civil.
    It looks like there were a lot of issues with that panel.
    I can’t support banning anyone from Wiscon before investigating the situation. I doubly can’t support banning the guest and publicly announcing the ban without speaking with the guest first.
    The guest could have been walking through the dealer’s room when the ban was announced. That could have set up a dangerous situation.
    So, Team No One.
    But, my opinion won’t matter to Wiscon as I have never attended this con.

  40. I’m not a fan of PDFs because most of them are difficult to read on my reader of choice, a Kobo Glo HD, but the ones I really find objectionable are the PDF excerpts with a watermark AND registration marks. Do they really expect us to print them on 8×11 sheets and cut them down to size? If they just trimmed them to the actual size, they might just be readable on most devices, rather than just on larger tablets and PCs or Macs.

  41. World Weary:

    Darren, thanks for posting the link to fananon.

    I agree. It gave me much food for thought.

  42. @Lurkertype and Lis: Netgalley titles sent to a kindle in .mobi form don’t expire or become unreadable – you wont be able to redownload from the website, but you’ll always be able to access the file on your device and (I think) send it to new devices through Amazon’s document management page. I think that’s the only exception though.

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