Pixel Scroll 8/10 Where the Scrolled Things Are

Where there’s smoke there’s… Well, exactly what there is is a subject of debate in today’s Scroll.

(1) Do not miss – “Dilbert Writes A Sci-Fi Novel”.

(2) Oh brave New World! Scientists claim to have pinned down one of Shakespeare’s previously unsuspected literary influences

South African researchers announced they found cannabis residue on pipe fragments found in William Shakespeare‘s garden.

Francis Thackeray, an anthropologist at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand and the lead author of the study published in the South African Journal of Science, said he and his team used gas chromatography mass spectrometry to analyze residue found on 24 pipe fragments from the bard’s hometown of Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, and cannabis residue was discovered on four fragments taken from Shakespeare’s garden.

(3) When Arthur C. Clarke introduced interviewer Jeremy Bernstein to Stanley Kubrick, he accidentally launched their 25-game chess duel.

I told Clarke that nothing would please me more. Much to my amazement, the next day Clarke called to say that I was expected that afternoon at Kubrick’s apartment on Central Park West. I had never met a movie mogul and had no idea what to expect. But as soon as Kubrick opened the door I felt an immediate kindred spirit. He looked and acted like every obsessive theoretical physicist I have ever known. His obsession at that moment was whether or not anything could go faster than the speed of light. I explained to him that according to the theory of relativity no information bearing signal could go faster. We conversed like that for about an hour when I looked at my watch and realized I had to go. “Why?” he asked, seeing no reason why a conversation that he was finding interesting should stop.

I told him I had a date with a chess hustler in Washington Square Park to play for money. Kubrick wanted the name. “Fred Duval” I said. Duval was a Haitian who claimed to be related to Francois Duvalier. I was absolutely positive that the name would mean nothing to Kubrick. His next remark nearly floored me. “Duval is a patzer,” is what he said. Unless you have been around chess players you cannot imagine what an insult this is. Moreover, Duval and I were playing just about even. What did that make me?

Kubrick explained that early in his career he too played chess for money in the park and that Duval was so weak that it was hardly worth playing him. I said that we should play some time and then left the apartment. I was quite sure that we would never play. I was wrong.

(4) The new Fantastic Four reboot is getting the kind of reaction that explains why the phrase “stinks on ice” was invented.

Not only were reviews scathing — resulting in a 9 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes — audiences on Friday night gave the $120 milliion Fox tentpole a C- CinemaScore, the worst grade that anyone can remember for a marquee superhero title made by a major Hollywood studio. (CinemaScore, based in Las Vegas, was founded in 1979.)

…For the weekend, Fantastic Four, starring Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell, topped out at a dismal $26.2 million from 3,995 theaters in North America, one of the lowest openings of all time for a Marvel Comics film adaptation

(5) Carrie Cuinn explained why Lakeside Circus killed plans to publish a Lou Antonelli story, what Antonelli did next, and the verbal attacks she received as a result.

I couldn’t stand by and do nothing after Mr. Antonelli publicly admitted to essentially SWATing someone in our community, especially given the numerous deaths by police and in police custody that have recently made the news. As I said in my letter, it’s a matter of SAFETY. Antonelli took away Gerrold’s safety when he filed that false police report, and I won’t support that by giving him my money or promoting his work.

I was content to do what I felt necessary privately, between Mr. Antonelli and myself, but he dragged me up in front of his fans and made a target of me. He knew people were defensive and angry on his behalf, and he gave them me as a target. Doing that, he took away my safety, too.

(6) Lou Antonelli says what happened wasn’t his intent, and apologized again.

I want to make it clear than when I posted about Carrie Cuinn and Lakeside Circus’ decision taking back their decision to publish a story of mine, I meant it as a cautionary tale – don’t be a jackass like I was, because there are repercussions. Experience is a hard teacher. I don’t begrudge the decision at all. I apologized to David Gerrold because I realized I did something stupid and I made a mistake. But I didn’t think I made a mistake in revealing Cuinn’s decision. Fact was. I thought people would commend her for it, and I thought there would be some people who would like to give her credit for it.

Now she says she’s gotten threats over the revelation. That’s not why I posted it! So I’m sorry again, in this case, because it never occurred to me her action would be seen negatively.

(7) K. Tempest Bradford has a take on the Antonelli/Gerrold story.

You hear all this, and your response is UGH, how terrible! That crosses a line! Antonelli should explain himself and apologize!

Oh? Really? A guy contacts a police department in a serious effort to have said police pay extra special attention to a convention attendee in an atmosphere where there’s already plenty to worry about with police overreacting and you want him to apologize?

Sure, Gerrold isn’t a young black man, so he’s already much safer around police than a lot of folks. But Antonelli’s intent was bring police into a situation for the purpose of causing alarm and harm to Gerrold for no other reason than that he can’t handle Gerrold having an opinion and a platform….

There are real ramifications here, real consequences. There may be a good chance nothing bad will happen. That doesn’t mean it’s okay. That doesn’t mean an apology is enough….

The difference between how we treat people from marginalized identities who do things harmful to our community and how we treat white men who harm our community is so stark, so blatant, that I feel like I’m living in a Onion article right now.

This is how you fail, white people of SFF. This right here….

(8) Some commenters are extrapolating Bradford’s post to mean that Benjanun Sriduangkaew, the subject of a report by Hugo nominee Laura Mixon, ought to be treated with comparable leniency.

Jason Sanford, for one, has written a post “On the double standard of genre apologies”.

Here’s a simple test. Can you figure out why the following situations are different?

(9) Ann Somerville sharply disagreed that these cases are comparable.

The crucial differences are – and Tempest fucking knows these:

  • Antonelli does not carry out secret campaigns of abuse. He does everything, for good or ill, under his own name (which is now mud).
  • He hasn’t been carrying out harassment of people, white/POC, male and female, straight and gay, cis and trans for over ten years
  • he apologised for what he actually did, in full – unlike Miss Hate who sort of vaguely alluded to bad behaviour, without acknowledging the full scope of what she did or directly apologising to her actual victims
  • his victims don’t include people of colour, but include one of Hate’s much loathed white women (that should make him a hero, according to Bradford and Hate)
  • People don’t feel constrained from criticising Antonelli on account of his oh so persecuted race and sexuality – which is still the case with Hate (despite the fact she is massively class privileged and not racially disprivileged in her own country.)

(10) In an earlier post, Jason Sanford made an appeal for peace in the genre.

But this incident has also brought into focus how much bad blood there is in the science fiction and fantasy genre. The letter Lou wrote wasn’t merely an attack on David — it was an attack on Worldcon and the entire genre.

Which I’m certain isn’t what Lou intended. I have no doubt he loves the genre. I’m certain he wants the genre to thrive and grow.

We have reached the point in the SF/F genre where people must decide what they want. Because there are now two simple choices: To destroy the genre or reach for peace.

Reaching for peace doesn’t mean silencing your views or beliefs. Our genre has long been a big tent where all viewpoints and people can co-exist. Yes, the genre has often not lived up to this ideal. And that doesn’t mean there won’t be disagreements and arguments and people who hate each other.

But at the end of the day a shared love of science fiction and fantasy joins us together. We must never forget this.

(11) Though prompted by her experience at the BEA, not by this latest kerfuffle, Kameron Hurley’s article for Locus “Your Author Meltdown Will Be Live-Tweeted” seems prescient.

The more people respect what you have to say, the more folks will come out of the woodwork trying to tear you down. Having been one of the people flinging arrows at authors myself (and let’s be real, I still do), I get it, and I accept it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to navigate when you’re sitting in a restaurant and wondering if your dinner conversation will end up in an Instagram video.

In the ten years I’ve been writing online, I’ve mostly been hated as some kind of women’s lib boogeyman, and that’s just funny more than anything. It’s a lot easier for me to dismiss haters when they’re sending me death threats for believing women are people. It’s harder to dismiss people who want me dead because they despise me in general. In the same breath they’ll say I should be garroted to keep me from speaking and Starbucks should stop serving Pumpkin Spice Lattes because, gosh, those lattes are gross.

More and more, ‘‘being a writer’’ isn’t about writing at all. It’s about the writer as celebrity. The writer as brand. The writer as commodity. And more and more, I see authors themselves reviewed as if they’re busi­nesses on Yelp.

(12) Is it possible that the extended edition of The Battle of the Five Armies could be even more violent than the version shown in theaters? TheOneRing.net theorizes that will be so —

According to a bulletin published today by the Motion Picture Association of America Classification and Rating Administration, the extended edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies will carry an “R” rating for “some violence.” Of course, it’s no news flash that the movie contains violence. The theatrical version’s PG-13 rating came with an advisory for “extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images.” So, it’s intriguing to imagine what, exactly, in the EE bridged that gap, especially with only “some violence” to go by. Possible EE spoilers ahead!

(13) The late Terrence Evans (1934-2015) is remembered at StarTrek.com:

Evans ventured to the Star Trek universe to play Baltrim, the mute Bajoran farmer, in the DS9 episode “Progress,” and Proka Migdal, the Bajoran who adopted a Cardassian war orphan, in “Cardassians.” He also appeared as the Kradin ambassador, Treen, in the Voyager hour “Nemesis.”

(14) Voice of Trillian in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Susan Sheridan, has passed away. SF Site News has more at the link.

(15) I believe Matt!

[Thanks to Gregory Benford, JJ, Andrew Porter and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]

259 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/10 Where the Scrolled Things Are

  1. @Lori Coulson
    If they actually improve their game enough to put readable and enjoyable works on the ballot, they might convince people that the stuff they like is good. (I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.)

    Besides, if RP run a slate, they don’t need to recruit “dozens of writers.” Apparently all VD needs are one or two writers to dust off some years-old stories and inflate the word count so they qualify as “substantially new works” and he could fill an entire slate. Not quite the documents-full-of-randomly-generated-text alluded to in an earlier post, although that would be a handy additional tool

  2. @ Ed: “I’m sure Mr Antonelli has learned his lesson, next time he tries to get someone into trouble he’ll be sure not to blurt it out during a podcast.”

    LOL! Yes, perhaps that is the lesson everyone can take away from this mess: If you want to get away with making a false report to the police, don’t announce your deed on a podcast.

    That there is a nuggety nugget of gold for would-be mastermind criminals everywhere.

  3. sez Laura Resnick on August 11, 2015 at 4:40 pm:

    @ Ed: “I’m sure Mr Antonelli has learned his lesson, next time he tries to get someone into trouble he’ll be sure not to blurt it out during a podcast.”

    LOL! Yes, perhaps that is the lesson everyone can take away from this mess: If you want to get away with making a false report to the police, don’t announce your deed on a podcast.

    That there is a nuggety nugget of gold for would-be mastermind criminals everywhere.

    Surely you meant “Nutty Nugget of gold”? [guileless, innocent expression]

  4. @ Aaron: “…what kind of boggles the mind is how the other “Superversive” participants in that Google Hangout just sat there and went along with it when he said he had sent a letter to the Spokane PD and that he thought Gerrold needed to be put in a secure psychiatric facility.”

    It didn’t really boggle me. By then, I was already so numb from listening to other portions of the podcast, in search of this segment, it probably would have taken a cattle prod to get a reaction from me. I kept wading through portions of the program in which a couple of the Puppy-nominated participants were so persistently self-congratulatory about the brilliance of their own work, and so disingenuous about the Puppy campaign, that I decided to keep a basin near the computer, just in case the nausea overwhelmed me.

    So when they all started making nasty comments about David Gerrold, Antonelli chiming in with his nuggety nugget about reporting David to the Spokane police as a DANGEROUS individual LIKELY TO INCITE VIOLENCE who should be confined to a psychiatric ward… It seemed much less outrageous than it would in the context of a normal discussion, and their casually cheery reactions to this information seemed perfectly in keeping with everything else.

    I kept thinking I was going to wake up in the shower and discover that the entire past year of Puppying was only a dream.

  5. “But Rabid Puppies are not Sad Puppies. We want nothing more than to crush SJW bones, drink SJW blood, and leave a smoking hole where every SJW institution used to be.”

    OMG! He said that?

    (wiping away tears of mirth)

    How did I miss this gem the first time around?

    Every time I think VD cannot get any sillier, he proves me wrong again.

  6. But Rabid Puppies are not Sad Puppies. We want nothing more than to crush SJW bones, drink SJW blood, and leave a smoking hole where every SJW institution used to be.

    “Get used to disappointment.”

  7. @Will McLean:

    It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who thought of TPB when I read that quote of VD’s!

  8. Aaron : Setting aside the fact that Antonelli did something stupid by sending the letter, what kind of boggles the mind is how the other “Superversive” participants in that Google Hangout just sat there and went along with it when he said he had sent a letter to the Spokane PD and that he thought Gerrold needed to be put in a secure psychiatric facility.

    i, The other participants were Wright and his wife.

    ii, Gerrold is gay.

    So, yeah, they probably took it as a *given* that Gerrold belongs in an asylum, and saw no need to question LA’s assertion.

  9. rrede : She Walks in Shadows new collection by Innsmouth Press, transformative works based on Lovecraft’s stories but told from point of view of women!

    “*UHHHH* *UNNNNNNNNHHHHH* Fuck, I am getting SO sick of this!” – Shub-Niggurath, The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.

  10. i, The other participants were Wright and his wife.

    I think there were at least two other participants, although I’m not going to go wade through the muck of that video again to figure out who they were. The point remains: This tiny group of writers spends their time nodding along with one another while they say and do things that make normal people look at them and think “What the Hell is wrong with you all?”

  11. I despaired when my email showed my 135 comments to get through, but once I realized how much of it was Brian-ing, and therefore skimmable, I brightened right up.

    For the record, I specifically recall Ann Somerville apologizing in this very forum for misbehavior. I was impressed that she did so.

    As to the Antonelli case, a lot of people have made some very good points. When I consider the totality of the circumstances, I’m

    GOD STALK!

  12. I’m not surprised that no one tried to tap the brakes on LA on that podcast. I think they didn’t say anything because they wouldn’t get that much blowback and thus they could sit back and watch the train wreck that is now what used to be LA’s potential writing “career” without having to worry about suffering any significant damage.

    The Puppies, by and large, don’t strike me as being overly concerned with trying to minimize the damage in this, even for someone on their team. They can now cluck sympathetically and may even say, “Look what those evil SJWs did to poor LA”!

  13. @Robert Reynolds: “This is why EPH will warp your mind, curve your spine and lose the war for the Allies”

    Yes! George Carlin FTW!

  14. Regarding the Superversive hangout thingie, I’d just note that there are ~630 views on youtube. Tell me again about the endless hordes of puppies who will gnaw the ankles of nasty SJWs until they and all their institutions collapse. Please.

  15. Regarding the Superversive hangout thingie, I’d just note that there are ~630 views on youtube.

    And I’d be willing to bet that a decent chunk of those views came after Jim Hines linked to it when he highlighted Antonelli’s comments about his letter to the Spokane police department.

  16. @Rev. Bob:

    I’m glad someone caught the reference! Carlin’s one of my favorite stand ups. He and Pryor were geniuses. I may be the only one who thinks so, but so is Elayne Boosler. She’s the only one of the three still going.

  17. So, just to finish my turn in the Brian barrel, I will spell out why I don’t think a 10-story pre-nom long list with no other changes will work.

    Best case: The Sads, suitably chastened by this year’s opprobrium, run a book-club-style suggestions list that somehow functions in no way like a slate. Huzzah. The Rabids, as self-important sociopaths led by the Dementor-in-Chief, slate their little pre-Whovian Grinchy hearts out. The rest of fandom tra-la-las a scattershot of stories they liked, the fools. So the (let’s say Novella) “long list” ends up like this (assuming long list noms are restricted to five):

    1) “I Know Why the Caged CHORF Screams” – Sad/Rabid
    2) “Big Boys Don’t Take Their Boot Off Your Neck” – Sad/Rabid
    3) “Parliament of Krill and Tardigrades” – Rabid
    4) “Crusading Jebus-Killers of Sodom IV” – Rabid
    5) “The Plural of SJW is Morlocks” – Rabid
    6) “Inclusive Space Utopia”
    7) “I’m Okay, You’re Okay, We’re in a Barely SpecFic Story”
    8) “If You were a RINO, My Love”
    9) “The Pink and Poofy Planet of Peace”
    10) “Thrilling Interspecies Negotiations Achieve Compromise”

    So now it’s time to narrow the list to final nominees. What do you think happens? Everyone reads these ten novellas and sagely weighs the merits of each? Or just splits into two “camps” (puppies and not-puppies) and most likely the puppies are all booted out. Congratulations, you have handed the puppies their grievances a bit early; you have invented a “slate detection/elimination” mechanism that probably works 98% of the time at the cost of looking exactly like a puppy-kicking martyr-making machine; you have elimanated the need for No Award and replaced it with No Nomination.

    However, you have also doubled the necessary reading (in ALL categories, so where is the extra lead time coming from?) and the headache of putting together a comprehensive pre-vote package, which lessens the chance of them actually being read. You have created another round of voting and all the attendant beaurocracy. And you have created a new, meaningless cover blurb: “Hugo Pre-Nominee”.

    In reality, of course, you get two Rabid slates (or one Rabid, one Sad/Rabid wink-wink) who eat up most or all of the slots, just like this year (a little tougher than gaming the 6/4, but not impossible) — plus assorted new shenanigans (“we nominate Scalzi, tee hee” or “we nominate Sriduangkaew, ha ha”) that we might as well ignore for now.

    So now maybe you get six-to-ten works behind No Nomination and suddenly the Hugo categories are threadbare or altogether empty of nominees, which kinda looks like the smoking hole a certain set of smoking assholes say they are after.

    Or you don’t offer No Nomination as an option on the long list, in which case you have this year’s result. No Awards up the wazoo. No improvement whatsoever.

    Long-listing favors the early adopters, but more so the evil organizations. Hint hint.

    Anyway, Brian, you have a blog, right? Maybe you can take all the info you have gained in two+ months of concentrated concernifying, and come up with a PowerPoint presentation or something on your ultimate solution. Then you can direct us to that. It would save a lot of eye-glazing (to which I now return*).

    *I am sorry for necessitating this in others.

  18. @JJ / Jim / Kyra/ various – damn you all to heck.

    ::adds God Stalk to reading list::

    ::whimpers::

    @Laura

    Stuff like that is why I tend to refer to Day as the walking personification of Voltaire’s Prayer.

  19. Not to be confused with bearocracy, which is government for and by a particular kind of gentleman.

  20. @Robert Reynolds: (Carlin and company)

    I was able to see Carlin live three times – twice from the front row, and one of those on the center aisle. I still have large chunks of Playin’ With Your Head memorized from my college days. (“Volleyball is just racketless team ping-pong played with an inflated ball and a raised net while standing on the table.”) I just wish his TV series would come out on DVD someday; I’ve already got the complete set of his standup specials. Come to think of it, there’s a 40-year retrospective/interview special he did, hosted by Jon Stewart, that I’d like to get my paws on…

    Boozler’s good, but I’d add Rudner to the list while wishing Bill Hicks was still around. He’d have had a field day with the last decade-plus; a lot of his political comedy is still frighteningly relevant. (Could you imagine him as a Daily Show correspondent in 2003?)

    On the flip side, it’s been depressing to watch Dennis Miller and Gallagher go around the bend. I still remember Gallagher’s “Leap Year Marathon” from… 1988, maybe? It was mostly a clip show, but there was some new material as well, and some of it was genius. There was a running bit called “Cold Realities” that started off with him sitting in an opened fridge and cautioning kids not to do this at home. He’d deliver a one-line observation, and for the first one the shelf above him dumped a freezer-full of ice cubes onto him. (Cold reality, see?) Subsequent lines were “rewarded” by someone throwing a bucket of water (or, later, other fluids) on him from off-camera. Unfortunately, the only line I remember is something like: “If everything that’s on the planet now was on the Ark, that means Noah had crabs. That’s cold.” Toward the end of the show, I believe they compiled all of those segments into one supercut. I’d pay five or ten bucks for that.

  21. sez NelC on August 11, 2015 at 11:43 pm:

    Not to be confused with bearocracy, which is government for and by a particular kind of gentleman.

    I, for one, welcome our new Ursine-American overlords.

  22. So, just to finish my turn in the Brian barrel, I will spell out why I don’t think a 10-story pre-nom long list with no other changes will work.

    You do realise that if a 10-story pre-nom long list proposal was on the table and had a good chance of being passed, Brian would be arguing against it, right?
    He’s against any change to the current system because he’s on the side of the Puppies.

  23. Godstalk is great. Written long time ago and yet I waited for years and decades for PC Hogdell to write more. The first is the best IMHO.

    I would like to thank bloodstone for his comment. Very illuminating. This discussion about EPH has been confusing to me. There is definite impetus in these comments to do just what the SP claimed . Change the game so the wrong authors can not compete. To me the solution seemed simple . Simply enlarge the votes that nominate. Based on commenters here there is a large base of “trufans” as GRRM called them. To me the Hugos were based on all SFF readers. But since I never knew the details I was wrong. It does seemed to be mostly from the con people

    As to the winners/ I really don’t think The Sp/ Rp slate will take most of the awards. The works were decent but not great.
    I speculate that next year the number of voters will preclude any power of slates wherever the slates come from.

  24. The point about EPH is that it doesn’t care who you are or who you vote for. Votes for Scalzi are counted just like votes for Correia. Nobody steps in and says “this voter is not a trufan, put their ballot in the bin”. But if there are a number of people who vote for a slate – a Sad Puppy slate or one of those SJW slates that are alleged to exist – their votes will tend to work against each other.

  25. Thanks Ray. I may be foolish and getting into the weeds for asking this question. But how is EPH different from the normal process?

  26. @RAH,

    Try reading the EPH FAQ. The associated Power Point (FAQ#2) is a worked example of what might happen if there was a slate in effect.

    In the example, under the normal/current process (which is first past the post), the slate gets all five finalists. Because EPH tallies the nominations differently (and that is the only change to the nomination rules), the effect of slates is mitigated.

  27. For the Worldcon member nominating it is exactly the same. You pick up to five works/people to nominate in each category and send in your ballot.

    The difference is that when the ballots are counted, each member has one ‘point’ that is divided between their nominees in a category. During the elimination process, the count will check how many ‘points’ each item has as well as the number of nominations, and use both to decide what is eliminated next. After each elimination your points are recalculated, so if you had five items on your ballot (.2 points each) and one of them is eliminated, the four items remaining will have .25 points each.

    There’s a PDF here which works through a count process in detail, and a discussion thread on Making Light.

  28. @RAH

    Adding to what Soon Lee has said, from my POV the good thing about EPH is that in a normal year, nothing changes. You still nominate 5 things in each category just as before, and the eventual nominees list comes out practically identical to the previous system. Testing has been done on genuine ballots from 1984 that had been saved, and the only difference was that a tie for the last slot in an incredibly tight category (2 votes difference between 5 nominees iirc) was decided differently.

    If there are slates in the mix, EPH turns their effect from an overwhelming one to one more appropriate to the number of supporters they have.

    ETA: ninja’d!

  29. @RAH —

    I would like to thank bloodstone for his comment. Very illuminating. This discussion about EPH has been confusing to me. There is definite impetus in these comments to do just what the SP claimed . Change the game so the wrong authors can not compete.

    No. Not so “wrong authors can not compete.”

    So that bloc voting can’t work to let a minority of voters determine the entire ballot, as happened this year. Slating/bloc voting has always been socially condemned; until recently, that was sufficient to nip the temptation in the bud. The Puppies, both Sad and Rabid, don’t care about social sanctions, which is why Brian Z is so fond of social sanctions: they’re ineffective in stopping this. Thus we now need something that limits the effectiveness of bloc voting, if we want the majority of voters to actually have a say in what’s on the ballot.

    To me the solution seemed simple . Simply enlarge the votes that nominate

    No, sorry, won’t work. As long as the current rules remain in effect, an organized bloc vote of less than 20% of the total will overwhelm the 80-plus% voting their individual, scattered preferences. Merely increasing the number of votes involved won’t change that.

    Based on commenters here there is a large base of “trufans” as GRRM called them. To me the Hugos were based on all SFF readers. But since I never knew the details I was wrong. It does seemed to be mostly from the con people.

    The Hugo Awards are entirely the creation of Worldcon. Worldcon invented them in 1953. Worldcon has awarded them annually since 1955. It’s Worldcon fans that have done the work, publicized the awards, defended the service mark, done the voting for the best sf each year that has made the Hugo Award prestigious.

    You need to be a member of Woldcon to vote. Anyone can become a supporting member of Worldcon, whether or not they are able to attend a given year’s Worldcon, but non-members have never been able to vote.

    But then Larry and Brad mistook the Hugos for the kind of local business booster award that isn’t really about whether Widgets Inc. is really making the best widgets, but rather about the owner or CEO of Widgets Inc. being a good guy and respected member of the business community, so that every respected member of the business community should be recognized over a period of years. And they didn’t realize that just being nominated for a Campbell was a considerable honor, and felt dissed when they didn’t win.

    And they figured out that they could game the system. And they brought in Beale, who just wants to, as he has often assured us, burn down the Hugos.

    And this year’s slated nominees aren’t just “not great.” Some of it is complete and utter crap. Wisdom From My Internet is just very bad, and not even sf-related no matter how hard you squint at it.

    So, yeah, we have to change the rules to prevent such intentionally destructive tactics continuing to work until they’ve destroyed the hard-built prestige of the Hugo Awards.

  30. To emphasize something that has been mentioned, but perhaps deserves to be called out in specific: E Pluribus Hugo is not, nor ever was conceived to be, a method of eliminating all slated candidates from the Hugo ballots. The people who created EPH have always recognized that a work that’s nominated on a slate is still a nominated work, and one of the explicit design goals for EPH was to ensure that slate nominations don’t have less influence on the final ballot, than do any other nominations.

    What EPH does is simply this: It ensures that slate nominations don’t have more influence on the final ballot than any other nominations.

    In a year with a slate, EPH ensures that a slate whose members make up a small percentage of the total nominators, cannot crowd all the non-slate nominations off of the final ballot—which is exactly what happened to more than one category in this year’s Hugo ballots.

    In a year without a slate, EPH ends up selecting pretty much exactly the same works for the final ballot as the current “first past the post” system does. Which, as it happens, was another of the design goals for EPH.

  31. Note well: Nowhere in EPH is there any rule, or procedure, or algorithm, for throwing out “conservative” works. Anyone who says there is any such rule/procedure/algorithm, is either (a) speaking from a position of massive ignorance about EPH, or else (b) flatly lying.

    Nowhere in EPH is there any rule, or procedure, or algorithm, that has the effect of giving a free ride to “SJW” works. Again: Anyone who says there is any such rule/procedure/algorithm, either (a) doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or (b) is outright lying.

  32. You do realise that if a 10-story pre-nom long list proposal was on the table and had a good chance of being passed, Brian would be arguing against it, right?
    He’s against any change to the current system because he’s on the side of the Puppies.

    I do realize this, doing it for the lurkers, blah blah bl–hey, there was a lurker! Hot dog!

  33. Brian Z.,

    Increasing the number of slots while keeping the current rules just makes the system susceptible to two slates instead of one.

    Even if that were a danger it could be addressed by social sanctions and no award.

    This result of relying solely on social sanctions and no award is that a small group of people can run a denial of service attack against the Hugo Awards, at the cost of $40 each.

    Vox Day and his crew are very similar in some ways to 4chan. They will do this “for the lulz”. How many years of No Award taking a majority of the rockets would it take for you to decide that a change is required?

    Why should we wait to address the problems we know about?

    What are the urgent problems we know about?

    The now proven fact that a small group of colluding voters can disenfranchise the majority.

    If you consider the ability of 15% of the people to disenfranchise 85% to be a problem under the current rules, you should support EPH.

    Again, I’ve given my reasons for saying that the advantages of the current system are as worthy of consideration as the risks, and that a solution with a social component – if nothing else, a period of broad consultation – is preferable

    In the absence of slates, EPH works like the current system.

    Do you or do you not consider the ability of 15% of the people to disenfranchise 85% to be a problem?

  34. @ RAH

    To me the solution seemed simple . Simply enlarge the votes that nominate

    In a normal set of nominations the enormous number of eligible works is such that a work that gets more than about 10-12% of the nominations is a runaway favorite, and a work that gets more than about 7% is pretty much assured a spot on the ballot. I counted the suggestions on the Sad Puppy “comment with your suggestions” pre-slate post this year, and the same holds true for Puppy nominations, at least in the novel category. The favorites got less than 10% of the nominations. This in a group self-selected for having overlapping tastes in SFF.

    A slate converts that 7-10% of the slate-adopting group to 100% or nearly that, at the cost of converging on an acceptable set of second bests and giving up nominating their honest favorites.

    Thus, just to balance a slate you need 10-15 times as many honest-favorites nominators as you have slate nominators. To overwhelm the slate you probably need 20 times as many honest-favorites nominators.

    Presently we have roughly 6 times as many honest-favorites nominators. To overwhelm the slate we would need to increase the number of honest-favorites nominators by a factor of three or so, while simultaneously not adding any more slate nominators.

    I’m not sure I would say this outcome is impossible, precisely, but it does seem unlikely in the extreme.

  35. Thanks all of you. I have a better understanding of the proposed system. Since I will not be at Sasquan my input to the business meeting will be nill ,but still it is nice to understand the proposal. Also thanks for the link.

    I have another question, how many of you are going to Sasquan?

    Unrelated, but if you are voting for site selection you had to pay another $ 40. Joni has been very nice contacting those of us that had not paid in advance. The Sasquan website did not have a payment page. The removed it but according to Joni will be put up again.. All money has to be received by August 15

  36. RAH: Unrelated, but if you are voting for site selection you had to pay another $40. Joni has been very nice contacting those of us that had not paid in advance.

    Yes, the additional fee is a bit confusing, until you understand that you’re essentially paying for a Supporting Membership for 2017 — and that by doing so a year early, you get the bonus of having a say in where that Worldcon will be held (a privilege which is only granted to members of the 2015 Worldcon).

    My experience with Sasquan, in relation to a number of snafus, is that they go out of their way to identify such issues rather than saying “too bad, so sad”, and work very hard to get issues resolved, as quickly as possible.

  37. I just checked and Sasquan put up the payment page for site selection. I had already mailed a check but I am impressed with the fast response.

  38. RAH:

    I am one of the bad-at-math types whose eyes glaze over when the technical details of EPH are discussed. I’m 90% content to trust those who say it will work and I don’t really feel the need to look inside the black box to see what the hamsters are doing in there.

    However, sometimes when complicated math/computer/physics stuff is explained to me in a really good way, I do have an aha! moment where I at least briefly follow it and understand it (tho I frequently forget it and would not be able to repeat the argument to someone else the way I could, say, a series of historical events and consequences). Which is a long-winded way of saying that when I read the document with the worked example of an EPH ballot, I *got it* and understood how it was supposed to work beyond “this will keep a slate from running the tables in the future.”

    So this non-techie endorses at least taking a look at the example. And pay no attention to BrianZ’s arguments about why it won’t work and why we should do nothing but contemplate possible counter scenarios ad nauseum. It all boils down to “change nothing” because he either truly believes that we can make slates go away by joining hands and wishing real hard, or because he actually is a stealth puppy who wants slates to work forever and ever. Either way, he sucks a lot of oxygen out of the room and gives literally nothing (other than the occasional mildly entertaining filk) in return.

  39. cmm,

    Either way, he sucks a lot of oxygen out of the room and gives literally nothing (other than the occasional mildly entertaining filk) in return.

    I appreciate you enjoy my entertainment value. I know, the mantra is “EPH should be discussed at Making Light,” but that seems like a sort of insider’s game. I think others have learned a lot about the proposals from reading here, which I don’t agree is a bad thing. Patrick May has now raised some good points, so I’m also glad he joined late in conversation.

    RAH: interesting comments, thank you.

    Patrick May:

    4chan. They will do this “for the lulz”.

    I’ll assume with you for a moment that this is the case. A few questions:

    Castalia House is an SFF publisher with actual working authors, not a board in someone’s parent’s basement. Which dozens of eligible nominees in the SFF industry would continue accepting purely destructive nominations “for the lulz” year after year?

    Vox Day doesn’t care about winning the award. Why field an unpopular slate with no chances when the endorsements probably won’t even stick? Why not encourage other kinds of tactical voting in ways that his fans feel disrupts “SJWs,” or manufacture controversy to bring down the internet and No Award them in droves? You aren’t even confident how many short story or novelette slots EPH can actually “rescue” from a slate. What tricks are up his sleeve?

    Isn’t it better to encourage more of the 10-15,000 (at this point) who are eligible to nominate each year to do so? Thousands would need to march in lockstep to derail that, and the potential to menace you in other ways would be reduced too. And it also answers whatever grievances the Puppies consider that they have by allowing no cliquish insider “SJWs” to wield undue influence. Isn’t it better to give everybody what they want?

  40. Isn’t it better to encourage more of the 10-15,000 (at this point) who are eligible to nominate each year to do so?

    Why do you continue to pretend that it is an “either, or” situation?

  41. Brian Z.,

    Isn’t it better to encourage more of the 10-15,000 (at this point) who are eligible to nominate each year to do so?

    I think that encouraging greater participation is a great idea. That can be done in addition to discouraging the disenfranchisement that slates can cause under the current rules. In fact, I would argue that reducing the power of slates to control the ballot will encourage greater participation.

    I’m still curious: Do you or do you not consider the ability of 15% of the people to disenfranchise 85% to be a problem?

  42. Aaron, did I say it was either/or? I said the traditional Hugo voting culture is a thing of beauty, and you shouldn’t discard it lightly, especially without broad consultation, especially if it might not “work”, without thinking very carefully.

    I’ll ask you too – why not focus your effort on building numbers of fans inspired to nominate? Or do you just prefer shouting down people on the internet who disagree with you?

  43. Patrick May: do you see where I have already answered you? Do you think the drafters of the “nominate five” system put it in there for the purpose of someday allowing a disgruntled minority communicating by ansible to burn down the awards? Or were they thinking of some nobler purpose?

  44. I’ll ask you too – why not focus your effort on building numbers of fans inspired to nominate? Or do you just prefer shouting down people on the internet who disagree with you?

    Why do you continue to pretend that it is an “either, or” situation?

    ETA: Low hanging fruits, I takes it….

  45. Let’s fisk along, like we did all summer. Let’s fisk along with Brian Z.

    Castalia House is an SFF publisher with actual working authors, not a board in someone’s parent’s basement.

    CH appear to be a vanity imprint and a one-man band; if there are other executives with a say in things, I have never heard them say anything on this. So, as a cult of personality, its “political wing” can apparently do what it likes with the business end. And there are enough like-minded folks/customers that this mess may in fact grow the CH brand in its own scuzzy niche — which I believe has been admitted as a goal.

    Which dozens of eligible nominees in the SFF industry would continue accepting purely destructive nominations “for the lulz” year after year?

    Deluded prolific ones who believe they deserve them (JCW); ones that don’t give a shit about awards from poncy SJW organizations (el Marmot); hot-headed “newbs” who may or may not know better (Crazy Uncle Lou); ones that can dine out on “Hugo Nominated”, and so on. Sure, you’ll weed out a lot of the ones providing diversity cover, but that probably won’t matter. And how many years worth of No Awards before the Hugos are really damaged? Three? Five?

    Vox Day doesn’t care about winning the award. Why field an unpopular slate with no chances when the endorsements probably won’t even stick?

    Every spot taken is one that Scalzi or the other CHORFs can’t have. See: The Dog in the Manger.

    Why not encourage other kinds of tactical voting in ways that his fans feel disrupts “SJWs,” or manufacture controversy to bring down the internet and No Award them in droves?

    Ok, I don’t understand this. Why would I want to encourage anything? If you think EPH is some kind of provocation, it’s not necessary. They’re self-provoking. They started this thing fighting the demons in their own mind and attacking their “enemies”.

    You aren’t even confident how many short story or novelette slots EPH can actually “rescue” from a slate.

    I am pretty confident we can rescue SOME. And SOME is better than NONE. EPH lets people who organize large voting blocs get some nominations, because in a sad way (heh), they have earned them. But they don’t get to have all of them.

    What tricks are up his sleeve?

    Who knows. But he’ll have to earn more chaos with new tricks! He doesn’t get to coast.

    But these are all things you already knew, Brian.

    Brian, I am now going to do to you want you want us to do the puppies:

    Please, Brian. Pretty please. Just stop. Maybe you can’t quite see it, but you are just clotting things up; you are filling the data stream with garbage and toxic runoff. Your sealioning has passed through something to be discussed and fixed, to annoying, to amusing, to perplexing, to just noise.

    If you want to discuss these topics, please pause to digest what others say, please answer direct questions, and please try to sum up rather than sealioning. And concentrate more on what you can do than what you think others should do. Lead by example Brian. Stop being the “ideas” guy just throwing out shit as it occurs to him and be the “oh crap, I have to implement this on time and on budget, I better create a solid plan” guy.

    I hate to say it, Brian, but if you don’t respond positively to this appeal, you not only slide further into irrelevancy (in my eyes, at least), but also put the lie what you purport to be your basic tactic for defanging the puppies. I have taken you at your word, so if you are just a troll, enjoy this feast; it’s the last one I will give you.

    I think you might be amazed how much better it is to be respected than just tolerated, to put your shoulder to the wheel rather than dragging your heels.

Comments are closed.