(1) DELANY ABOUT STONEWALL. Much about the country’s sexual history and his own informs “Stonewall, Before and After: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany” in the LA Review of Books.
…Years later, my mother and the downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Horn, whose kids had also gone to Camp Woodland, were talking about “The Jewel Box Revue,” which had returned to the Apollo Theater at 125th Street in New York. And my mother said, “You know, that’s Mary, that was Mary Davies, who was a counselor up at the summer camp.” And I realized I knew Stormé DeLarverie. And I suddenly realized this is not a person who is far away from me, this is somebody I sat next to on the piano bench, who helped me write a cantata and sat beside me at chorus rehearsal at Woodland — someone who had been very close to me.
Cut to Stonewall.
Stonewall happened when I was 27, so a decade later. And who was the person who was supposed to have thrown the first punch at Stonewall? Stormé DeLarverie!
(2) STAN LEE COMMEMORATIVE. Marvel Toy News doesn’t want you to miss this chance to spend your money: “Hot Toys Stan Lee GOTG Cameo Figure Up for Order!”
Just when it seemed as though the Toy Fair Exclusive Scarlet Spider sixth scale figure was a lock for “Fastest Hot Toys Sell-Out of 2019” after going to Wait List in under 12 hours, Hot Toys dropped a bombshell this week when they revealed an MMS that’s likely to blow poor Scarlet Spider’s sales out of the water! It’s so “out there” that many collectors never even considered it could happen, but the EXCLUSIVE Hot Toys Stan Lee in Spacesuit 1/6 figure is now up for order!
(3) WHERE THE FUR FLIES. Ursula Vernon reporting from the scene at Anthrocon. Thread starts here.
(4) THE GREAT FUR MIGRATION. “The origin of how Pittsburgh and furries fell in love with each other” is a fascinating article in the Pittsburgh City Paper.
…So, Anthrocon left Philadelphia and migrated to Pittsburgh in 2006. If there were any thoughts that the furries made the wrong choice, those were quickly assuaged the first day of the convention that year. People from Downtown restaurants, bars, and hotels all ascended to meet the furries at the convention center. [Sam Conway, the CEO of nonprofit Anthrocon] says they were there to welcome, greet, take pictures with, and even hug some of the furries.
“The city literally and figuratively ran out and gave us a hug,” says Conway.
Conway says Anthrocon and the furries have been in love with Pittsburgh ever since. He has been apologizing to Visit Pittsburgh for the last 14 years, saying he unfairly stereotyped the city of Pittsburgh. But he says that might have actually resonated stronger with furries, who have faced their own damaging stereotypes.
“Maybe that is why it resonated it,” says Conway. “We came here and realized, ‘Look at how wrong we were.’”
The TV coverage of this year’s con includes –
(5) ABOUT FANTASY. Well, when you put it that way —
(6) BERRY HARVEST TIME. John Scalzi probably doesn’t find these experiences funny, yet he is perfectly capable of treating them as the inspiration for amusing posts: “Endgames, Tinkerbell and Happily Ever After”.
In the wake of a recent mild uptick in people being angry at me for existing, a question in email, which I am paraphrasing for brevity:
What do you think these people are hoping for with these posts? What’s their endgame, and how do they think it will affect you?
…In the case of the alt-right dingleberry actively hoping for the collapse of traditional publishing (or at least Tor Books), which will presumably take me down with it: I think the plan there was reassuring the other dingleberries with whom he corresponds on social media that, yes, indeed, one day my virtue-signaling self will get mine, along with all of traditional publishing (or at least Tor Books), and what a glorious day that will be for them. As this particular alt-right dingleberry self-publishes on Amazon, there’s also the implication that upon the smoking ruins of traditional publishing (or at least Tor Books), and the dessicated bones of all the SJWs that toiled there, will come a new age where these alt-right dingleberries and their work will finally take their rightful place at the top of the science fictional heap, while I and my sort, I don’t know, maybe suck quarters out of vending machines to survive.
In case anybody cares which dingleberry is being discussed, in the Twitter thread version of this post, a redacted tweet could be traced to Brian Niemeier.
(7) SFF DISQUALIFIED AS LITERATURE? A long and interesting study of Ted Chiang’s fiction in the New York Review of Books: “Idea Man”. (Online version is behind a paywall.)
What fiction is made out of is a bit of a mystery, but an old bromide has it that ideas should not be a major component. T.S. Eliot praised Henry James for not having any in his fiction, which seems to accord with James’s own understanding of his work. “Nothing is my last word about anything,” he once wrote to a critic who had upset him by construing a particular portrait in one of his tales as a general statement. Along similar lines, George Orwell praised Charles Dickens for being “a free intelligence” who, in Orwell’s estimation, “has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong.” Ideas, by virtue of their abstractness, are deprecated as too smooth and clean, deficient in the loam of contradictory specifics from which rich fiction grows, and the wish to demonstrate an idea is seen as dangerous because it might lead a writer to neaten her picture of the world, and thereby falsify it.
Some kinds of ideas probably should be kept out of literature. It’s understandable, for example, that Orwell dismissed political dogmas as “smelly little orthodoxies,” and that he celebrated Dickens for writing novels that were innocent of them. But does it make sense to exclude ideas drawn from science or math?
The challenge of science fiction is in its embrace of them….
(8) PILGRIMAGE. NPR reminds us that Slaughterhouse-Five was published 50 years ago.
When it was published 50 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” was an instant hit, an anti-war novel that was searing, satirical, strange and darkly funny. It revolves around a controversial moment in World War II, the firebombing of Nazi Germany’s loveliest city.
(9) PONSOT OBIT. The late Marie Ponsot is celebrated by Samuel R. Delany:
Marie Ponsot, one of my early mentors, has passed away, well into her 90s. She was 98. She was the dedicatee of my book ABOUT WRITING, and when I was sixteen, she gave me my first hardcover copy of NIGHTWOOD, a book I read more times than any other single novel and taught again and again.
She was a kind, generous, and wonderful poet. Her first book was True Minds, and her second was Admit Impediment. She was the pocket poet who lived on this side of the country and had known Ferlinghetti in France. Her French was excellent. Her daughter Monique remains my face book friend, and her son Antoine was the dedicatee of my third novel, The Towers of Toron. Sometime later she was the traveling companions of my wife, Marilyn Hacker.
Learn more in the Wikipedia article about her: Marie Ponsot.
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.
- July 6, 1990 — Jetsons: The Movie premiered in theatres.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]
- July 6, 1916 — Donald R. Christensen. Animator, cartoonist, illustrator, writer. He worked briefly at Warner Bros. studio, primarily as a storyboard artist for Bob Clampett’s animation unit. After that, he worked for Dell, Gold Key and Western Publishing comic books, as well as Hanna Barbera, Walter Lantz Productions and other cartoon studios. He wrote and provided illustrations for such comic book titles as Magnus, Robot Fighter, Donald Duck, and Uncle Scrooge. (Died 2006.)
- July 6, 1927 — Janet Leigh. Certainly best remembered as doomed Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. She would also be in with her daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, The Fog and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. She’s also in the Night of the Lepus, a very odd 70s SF film. (Died 2004.)
- July 6, 1945 — Rodney Matthews, 74. British illustrator and conceptual designer. Among his many endeavors was one with Michael Moorcock creating a series of 12 large posters that showed scenes from Moorcock’s ‘Eternal Champion’ series. This is turned became the Wizardry and Wild Romance calendar. He also worked work with Gerry Anderson on the Lavender Castle series.
- July 6, 1945 — Burt Ward, 74. Robin in that Batman series. He reprised the role in voicing the character in The New Adventures of Batman and Legends of the Superheroes , and two recent films, Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders and Batman vs. Two-Face. The latter have the last work done by Adam West before his death.
- July 6, 1946 — Sylvester Stallone, 73. Although I think Stallone made a far less than perfect Dredd, I think the look and feel of the first film was spot on for the film which was something the second film, which had a perfect Dredd in Keith Urban, utterly lacked. And Demolition Man and him as Sergeant John Spartan were just perfect.
- July 6, 1950 — John Byrne, 69. A stellar comic book artist and writer. He’s done far too much to detail here so I’ll just single out that he scripted the first four issues of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, was the writer and artist on the excellent Blood of the Demon from 1-17 and responsible for Spider-Man: Chapter One which took a great deal of flak.
- July 6, 1980 — Eva Green,39. First crosses our paths in Casino Royale asVesper Lynd followed by Serafina Pekkala in The Golden Compass, and then Angelique Bouchard Collins in Dark Shadows. Ava Lord in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (weird films are those) with a decided move sideways into being Miss Alma Peregrine for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. And she was Colette Marchant in Dumbo. She’s got two series roles to her credit, Morgan Pendragon in Camelot and Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful.
(12) MY ULTIMATE PURPOSE. Seeing this tweet, I’m reminded of Sirens of Titan and how the Tralfamadorians directed the development of humanity simply to produce a needed spare part for a spaceship.
(13) BLIND BARD. Get a head start celebrating Heinlein’s birthday tomorrow by listening to the X-Minus One radio broadcast of “The Green Hills of Earth”:
“The Green Hills Of Earth”. The story of Rhysling, the blind folksinger of the spaceways! Great radio. The script was previously used on “Dimension X” on June 10, 1950 and December 24, 1950. + This is the story of Riesling, the singer of the space ways. Future generations of school children have sung his songs in English, French or German, the language doesn’t matter, but it was an Earth tongue. But the real story of Rhysling is not found in the footnotes of a scholars critique or a publishers biography. It is in the memories of the old time space men the pioneers who pushed the thundering old fashioned rockets to the far strange ports that are our common place heritage – these men know the true story of Rhysling.
(14) AWARD KERFUFFLE. Amanda Marcotte points to Slate’s coverage of the Staunch Book Prize, “Why an Award for Books Without Violence Against Women Is So Controversial”. Thread starts here.
The Slate article begins –
An award exclusively for novels that do not depict violence against women has come under fire for the second year in a row. British author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless launched the Staunch Book Prize in 2018 specifically to recognize thrillers “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.” The prize drew controversy almost as soon as it was announced, with crime writers such as Val McDermid arguing that “not to write about [violence against women] is to pretend it’s not happening,” and CrimeFest, the Bristol-based festival for crime novelists, ultimately withdrawing its support.
Sophie Hannah, who writes psychological thrillers as well as the continuation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mysteries, publicly announced that she would ask her publishers not to submit her books for the award. She also made the case in a lengthy Facebook post that the Staunch Book Prize muddies its message by taking an overt stand against one type of violence but not others: “If the Staunch Prize were to be awarded to a book in which a man is murdered, on the other hand, how could we avoid the conclusion that the prize, at worst, approves of this, or, at best, doesn’t disapprove of it all that much?”
(15) YOUR PLASTIC PAL. A BBC video reports “My date with a robot”:
In a place, like Japan, where workers are desperately needed, the government is hoping that robots could be the answer.
Some developers believe that instead of replacing us, robots could help get more people into work. But would you let a robot read you the news, look after your children, or even, take you on a date?
BBC’s Population Reporter Stephanie Hegarty went to Tokyo to meet them.
(16) A THOUSAND EYES. Funny bit about a peacock:
(17) NOT COMPETITION – ENVIRONMENT. “Amazon at 25: The story of a giant”
“There’s no guarantee that Amazon.com can be a successful company. What we’re trying to do is very complicated,” said Jeff Bezos in 1999, just five years after launching the online firm.
That the firm’s founder was so uncertain of its future seems surprising.
Today, 25 years on from when it started, Amazon is one of the most valuable public companies in the world, with Mr Bezos now the world’s richest man, thanks to his invention.
What started as an online book retailer has become a global giant, with membership subscriptions, physical stores, groceries for sale, its own smart devices and a delivery system which can get things to customers in just an hour.
So how has the Amazon empire been built?
(18) COUNTDOWN. BBC takes a look at “Apollo in 50 numbers: the technology”.
The Apollo programme pushed space and computing technology to its limit. Cutting edge at the time, some of the tech used seems alarmingly simple today.
74: Memory (ROM) of Apollo guidance computer, in kilobytes
Computer technology was one of the greatest – and long lasting – achievements of Apollo. From the solid-state microcomputer fitted to the lunar lander, to mighty IBM mainframes, with their flashing lights and banks of magnetic tape.
To navigate the Apollo spacecraft the quarter of a million or so miles to the Moon and then descend to a precise spot on the surface, astronauts used the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).
Housed in a box around the size of a small suitcase, with a separate display and input panel fitted to the main spacecraft console, it was a masterpiece of miniaturisation.
Developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the AGC was filled with thousands of integrated circuits, or silicon chips. Nasa’s order of this new technology led to the rapid expansion of Silicon Valley and accelerated the development of today’s computers.
(19) ON THE MOVE. In “Fairytales of Motion” on Vimeo, Alan Warburton explains how animators, with an emphasis on classic Disney films, use motion in their animation.
[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, mlex, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Paul Weimer.]
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Oh, yeah, I’ve got timing.
Ticky, ticky, ticky, ticky timing.
(11) John Byrne gets points from me for doing a Herbie story. It wasn’t perfect, but the important thing was that he did it. Also, I thought Stallone made a pretty good Dredd, and that the movie got a bum rap (though I’ll admit he shouldn’t have taken the helmet off).
(11) I enjoyed the recent animated Adam West/Burt Ward Batman movies mentioned in Burt’s birthday note. I remember watching the 1966 Batman series (in reruns) when I was too young to know they were not gritty true crime tales.
11
The “perfect Dredd” was Karl, not Keith, Urban.
Also I’m glad to be reasonably functional after all the area excitement of the last couple of days.
11) My first introduction to John Byrne was his run on Fantastic Four (I missed his time on X-Men) and it’s still some of my favorite stuff from that era; and I’m just sad that he never finished The Last Galactus Story that he started in Epic Magazine.
(2)
That’s seriously cool! (Want! …Heck, I think Stan would enjoy it even more than the rest of us!)
(7) Orwell either read a different Charles Dickens than I did, or has a very different notion of “ideas.” Does anyone know if anyone ever told him there were ideas contaminating his fiction?
DeForest “Dr ‘Bones’ McCoy” Kelly (post-ST:TOS) was one of Janet Leigh’s co-stars in “Night of the Leputs”. Bugs Bunny, AFIAK, was not.
@Lis Carey
I can’t say I like all of Dickens’s work, but “Bleak House” is actually close to funny.
I have to say that the particular selection of Byrne’s work there strikes me as a little bit eccentric.
Instead of “Pixel First, Fix It In The Scroll”, shouldn’t we “Pixel twice Scroll once”?
11) Omg, Burt Ward! I’ve always wanted to read his memoirs which if I understood correctly reached Münchhausen levels of lying. Supposedly Ward is a ladies man, has photographic memory, is a martial arts champion, was a pro-scater…
My favourite Stallone movie is Oscar, a wonderful gangster comedy of mistaken identities. The casting is superb, the script is great and Tim Curry is totally fantastic in his role as a linguist who tries to teach Stallone to talk correct English.
@P J Evans
But maybe Keith could do a good job. Randy Travis was decent in “The Rainmaker”, and Dwight Yoakam held his own in “Sling Blade” and “Red Rock West”. So country musicians can act, some of them.
(11) John Byrne. Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch — nothing more need be mentioned.
I’ve a question for historically astute fans.
The 1992 Worldcon (MagiCon) and the Hugo Awards that year. Connie Willis’s story “In the Late Cretaceous” was a finalist for Best Short Story. My question is whether there was any fuss about whether the story was science fiction or not?
Camestros Felapton: Connie Willis’s story “In the Late Cretaceous” was a finalist for Best Short Story. My question is whether there was any fuss about whether the story was science fiction or not?
I can’t answer your question, but I will say that story’s nomination is one that has always baffled me (along with “The Soul Selects Her Own Society”, which won in 1997). I can only presume that they made the ballot because there were a lot of academics in the nominating pool.
And I say this despite being a big Connie Willis fan.
(14) Marcotte is right about this.
Quite possibly what he was talking about was more ‘following a party line’. The word ‘ideas’ doesn’t appear in what’s directly quoted from Orwell there.
Oh “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” is something I would have very much voted for and/or nominated if I’d had the opportunity 🙂
David Goldfarb says I have to say that the particular selection of Byrne’s work there strikes me as a little bit eccentric.
And your choices would no less eccentric which is to say personal?
Based just on the non-paywalled bit of that article, Henry James saying “nothing is my last word on anything” sounds less like “ideas don’t belong in fiction” than like Le Guin saying in Dancing at the Edge of the World that “the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.”
By that reading, the idea (yes!) isn’t that his writing wasn’t motivated or driven at least partly by ideas. It’s that living authors are in fact alive, and they and their opinions change over time. Le Guin was reacting to people enthusiastically quoting past-her to support positions that current-her no longer agreed with. James might have been thinking something similar, or just that it’s not a flaw in a writer or their work if their latest book is somehow consistent with something they wrote years earlier.
If you can’t step into the same river twice, you can’t read the same book twice, and nobody should be expected to write the same book over and over.
Dismissing political dogmas as “smelly little orthodoxies” doesn’t mean that ideas, including political ideas, don’t belong in fiction. The article is quoting Orwell, who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm as well as Homage to Catalonia and “Politics and the English Language.”.
Wait, another scroll title from me? Hunh.
12) I KNEW IT! 😉
So, any Filers going to Readercon next week? It will be my first time there.
@14: I’m not surprised there’s a fuss, but I’m reminded of the arguments recently that it was time for media to stop using “fridging” to drive stories; the award may be more restrictive, but it challenges writers to think instead of grabbing the obvious/cliched tool.. An afterthought: what do the judges think about psychic violence (e.g., gaslighting, or the other sorts of domineering seen in The Taming of the Shrew)?
@Camestros Felaptron: I do not remember any fuss over the Willis. However, I was a little … busy … that summer (doing floor plans and the liaising with all the exhibit (and other) department heads that required) and was not following what internet there was at the time, so there may have been rumblings I was not aware of. I suspect the general attitude of the time was less inclined to split hairs over the work of someone who was already a notable figure (see “Fire Watch”) — and the attitude of whoever was running the Hugos was probably close to recent ones of letting the voters decide anything that wasn’t quantitatively laid out in the rules
@JJ: I doubt there were lots of academics (although there may have been many fans amused by the contemptuous portrayal of average students); thehugoawards.org doesn’t have statistics, but my recollection is that Hugos had substantially fewer voters and nominees back then (in general, not to mention any oxygen-sucking effect from an extremely heated site-selection race), and short stories
13) That’s not a great adaptation. There’s a lot wrong with Rhysling, and not just the overdone accent. This moment says it all for me: Eulfyvat ybfrf uvf qvtavgl juvyr gur pncgnva xrrcf uvf. That is entirely against the characterization of Rhysling and the other characters. I suppose in the fifties, zhgvabhf orunivbe jnf sebjarq hcba.
It still has its moments. I totally believed how those guys got to Venus. It puts an added dimension onto “Logic of Empire” in my head.
–which would make a good movie, wouldn’t it? Ava DuVernay, perhaps.
The easy casting would be to make Jones black and Wingate white, but there might be some more interesting choice.
@me above: I should add that I enjoyed it greatly, flaws and all.
Keith Urban as Dredd with the soul patch and emo hair sticking out the helmet would’ve been the most unexpected comic book movie casting since Michael Keaton as Batman.
Started Naomi Novik’s “Spinning Silver”, and it seemed very familiar. A little Google research tells me the novel is based on a short story published in 2016. I think it would have been a courtesy to the reader, and spared me a little confusion, if the publishers had seen fit to mention the fact somewhere in the book, on the jacket or wherever. (This isn’t really a problem, but I was somewhat confused for a bit.)
@Camestros Felapton: I found this little thread in the rasfw archives.
@Paul Weimer I will be there! However, I am shy and will probably just sit in panels and kaffeklatches and listen quietly. I’ve been going for the past couple of years and really enjoyed it!
@Goobergunch: Can you repost that link – it’s not working for me
Hugo reading – I’m reading the Strange Horizons packet submission “Strange Waters” is a great story: http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/strange-waters/
I should add that I personally don’t have an issue with fiction that is sciency but not speculative wandering into the unfenced parkland that is science fiction. Also, I hold that somethings and topics are so inherently science fictional that a story about them is SF even without being speculative (especially rockets and spacecraft). However, I know sensible people who think otherwise for sensible reasons. So I sort of assume Willis’s story would have provoked that kind of discussion.
“Mind the pixels, and the scrolls will file themselves.”
@Andrew: Ugh, I see what happened. The URL contains quotation marks. I dunno how to fix that reasonably (especially while on my phone at a con), sorry.
And yes “Strange Waters” is quite lovely isn’t it? It was on my nomination ballot.
Goobergunch: I would have fixed it, now that a problem has been pointed out, except there is no URL in the comment text.
Something in the way she scrolls attracts me like no other pixel.
Trying again.
John Scalzi yet again flatters himself by believing us puppies think about him as anything other than an object of fun and derision. John, We made our point! We don’t care about you anymore! That woman who wrote about you and the fan fiction Hugo is not a puppy and probably just as “woke” and politically incontinent as you are.
Your only utility to us is as the headliner in the “party tapes” we play during our covens.
LET ME WRITE YET ANOTHER COMMENT ABOUT YOU TO SHOW HOW LITTLE I CARE!
Hey man, it’s Scalzi who keeps posting about this. And he really should be trying to meet his deadlines instead, don’t ya think?
It amuses me how desperate some people are to convince Scalzi that they don’t care about Scalzi. As if Scalzi actually might care about their opinion.
It really demonstrates a pathetic sort of fanboyishness. “Look at me ignoring you! Look at me! LOOK! I’m IGNORING YOU! Validate my existence by acknowledging how much I’m IGNORING you!”
It’s rather like how my cat used to “punish” us after we returned home from vacation. Hobbsie would sit in the same room with her back turned, pointedly ignoring us. If we moved to a different room, she would also move to that room and sit down in front of us with her back facing us again. She’d keep this up for two or three days until she decided we’d been sufficiently punished. It was rather sad when she got old and went deaf; she’d attempt to actively snub us, but she’d have to keep darting glances over her shoulder to make sure we hadn’t left…
@Andrew and Goobergunch: I loved “Strange Waters” as well. It was on my nominating ballot, and I was disappointed to see it didn’t make the final cut.
WHATEVER YOU DO DONT THINK UPON THE SCALZI FOR IF THEE THINK UPON THE SCALZI HE WILL BE IN THY THOUGHTS!
Thanks Goobercrunch! Very helpful.
@Goobergunch: Thanks for the corrected link. I do like the notion that by implicitly comparing humans and dinosaur behaviors, the Willis story is doing something science-fictional. I always thought of Cryptonomicon as SFnal because it is (in part) telling the story of WWII as a problem in information dispersion and control, and that kind of perspective twist is the kind of thing that SF is meant for.
@All: Glad to see that other folks liked “Strange Waters” – the Hugo season is great for reminding me to check out short fiction markets that I don’t always think of (in the future I’ll be looking for Strange Horizons much more than I’ve gotten around to in the past).
Thanks for the repost of the Scalzi video – it’s good to see people having fun in fandom.
I saw that lip sync performance live at NerdCon and it was glorious.
YOU DO DONT THINK UPON THE SCALZI FOR IF THEE THINK UPON THE SCALZI HE WILL BE IN THY THOUGHTS!
No, no, be not a feared. Fools and buffoons are to be welcomed and treasured. It is a delight to be entertained in the giggling lobes by the Chicos, the Moes and the Curly Joes, and Scalzi who dances the Harlequinade Spasmodic!
Since Kip Williams brought up the incomparable Herbie in reference to John Byrne, I must comment that the classic character would make a great cos-play for Kim Jong Un.
@Jon
Uh huh. Ya’ll care about him so little that you’re here making multiple comments about how you DON’T CARE ABOUT SCALZI, OKAY, and this whole thing was set off by Brian Niemeier just randomly bringing him up mid buy-my-books advertising spiel. Sure. Very believable. May I suggest that the best way to prove how much you don’t care about Scalzi would be to refrain from talking about him..?
Read any good books lately?
Jon Bromfield: Hey man, it’s Scalzi who keeps posting about this.
Yes, in response to the dingleberries which keep posting about him, despite their insistence that they don’t care, they don’t care, they don’t care!, but they still feel compelled to keep posting about him. Those piñatas aren’t out of candy yet, why should Scalzi stop whacking them?
Jon Bromfield: And he really should be trying to meet his deadlines instead, don’t ya think?
He’s meeting the deadlines for his 3.4 million dollar contract just fine, but I’m sure that he appreciates your concern for his wellbeing.
Come to think of it, you’re one of those dingleberry piñatas. Have you got any Jolly Ranchers left in you?
Meredith, sorry ya’ll havin’ a hard time with this. Let me try agin.
Collectively, us puppies don’t give a rat’s ass about John Scalzi. The Dark Lord is way too busy with his myriad publishing enterprises and dark designs on the wicked to waste time on him. Larry Correia spends most of his time actually writing fantasy and science fiction.. We Puppies have caused ya’ll to turn the Hugos into a festering heap of converged mediocrity and we are thus sated and content. If you want to see our monument, look at the last few Hugo award ceremonies.
Some on this site seem to think our glorious movement has been beaten and banish into oblivion. So some Puppies, like me, do like to let ya’ll know we’re still here, fat and happy and gloating.
Scalzi, in his creative decline, sometimes tries to drum up attention and sympathy by railing against imagined Puppy plots. Well, I only post to cry “bullshit,” and I only do so when he spouts off. I promise you, if John Scalzi never mentions, or in his trademark passive-aggressive way, refers to the Puppies, you will not hear from your friend Jon about Scalzi again.
I guarantee you, though, he’ll go back to blaming President Trump for missing his deadlines.
.
.
@me: departure too hurried. What I intended to finish with was that there were enough short stories even in the days before netzines that putting one on the ballot generally didn’t take many nominations as the nominations tended to be scattered. Actually, this was true of more than short stories; IIRC, The Guardsman got onto the Hugo novel ballot 3 years before with ~50 piled-up votes.
Jon Bromfield: Some on this site seem to think our glorious movement has been beaten and banish into oblivion. So some Puppies, like me, do like to let ya’ll know we’re still here, fat and happy and gloating.
Your <cough> “glorious movement” <cough> has indeed been beaten and banished into oblivion from Worldcon and the Hugo Awards, which are steaming along just fine now that you’re gone and no longer able to cheat garbage onto the Hugo ballot. What y’all are doing now is of little interest to Worldcon fans, except when one of you pokes your head up to make a fool of yourselves again, like Brian Niemeier just did. Like you just did.
It’s hilarious that you’re happy and gloating about being beaten and banished to oblivion, but hey, whatever floats your boat.