Pixel Scroll 8/31 From the SJW Aisle at Victoria’s Secret

We now return you to those thrilling days of yesterscroll.

(1) Some anniversaries.

August 29, 1997 Cyberdyne’s “Skynet intelligence system becomes self-aware. September 1, 1922 Yvonne De Carlo (Lily Munster) is born in Canada. September 3, 1969 The Valley of Gwangi opens in New York City.

(2) The “17 places you won’t see on the official UCLA campus tour” include —

#1

On the second floor of Boelter Hall, home of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, there’s a seemingly random arrangement of dark and light gray floor tiles outside room 2714. The tiles actually spell out “Lo and behold” in binary code. The hidden message was secretly added to a renovation project in 2011 as a clever (and subtle) way to honor Internet pioneer and professor Leonard Kleinrock.

#4

Clayburn La Force, who received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from UCLA, was the Anderson dean who spearheaded the construction of the school’s contemporary building complex. To honor him, one of the exterior red brick pillars in the Anderson courtyard carries the inscription, “May La Force Be With You.”

#5

Among the campus’ little-known treasures is the largest collection of meteorites in California (and fifth-largest in the nation.) Assembled for years by cosmochemist John Wasson, researcher Alan Rubin and their colleagues, more than 1,500 space rocks rest in the UCLA Geology Building. About 100 of them are on display at the UCLA Meteorite Gallery,

#7

If you can find room 60 in the section of the basement of Powell Library Building housing the Office of Instructional Development, you’ll see a sign that commemorates the room where “Fahrenheit 451” took shape. In 1950 and 1953, author Ray Bradbury came supplied with a bag of dimes for the rental typewriters. He clacked out “The Fireman” in nine days (total cost $9.80) and returned to rework his story into “Fahrenheit 451.” You can still find a copy of his original work in UCLA Library Special Collections, which houses a rich treasure trove of Bradburyana.

(3) Eric Flint – “The Divergence Between Popularity and Awards in Fantasy and Science Fiction”

[Another epic.]

Here’s the truth. Of the twenty-two authors today whom the mass audience regularly encounters whenever they walk into a bookstore looking for fantasy and science fiction, because they are the ones whose sales enable them to maintain at least a full shelf of book space, only one of them—Neil Gaiman—also has an active reputation with the (very small) groups of people who vote for major awards.

And they are very small groups. Not more than a few hundred people in the case of the Hugos and Nebulas, and a small panel of judges in the case of the WFC.

With them, Neil Gaiman’s popularity hasn’t—yet, at least—eroded his welcome. He’s gotten five nominations and two wins for the Hugo; three nominations and two wins for the Nebula; eight nominations and one win for the WFC—and almost all of them came in this century.

But he’s the only one, out of twenty-two. In percentage terms, 4.5% of the total. (Or 4.8%, if we subtract Tolkien.)

There’s no way now to reconstruct exactly what the situation was forty years ago. But I know perfectly well—so does anyone my age (I’m sixty-one) with any familiarity with our genre—that if you’d checked bookstores in the 1960s and 1970s to see how shelf space correlated with awards, you’d have come up with radically different results. Instead of an overlap of less than five percent, you’d have found an overlap of at least sixty or seventy percent….

And that was the Original Sin, as it were, of the Sad Puppies. (The Rabid Puppies are a different phenomenon altogether.) As it happens, I agree with the sense the Sad Puppies have that the Hugo and other F&SF awards are skewed against purely story-telling skills.

They are. I’m sorry if some people don’t like to hear that, but there’s no other way you can explain the fact that—as of 2007; I’ll deal with today’s reality in a moment—only one (Neil Gaiman) of the thirty authors who dominated the shelf space in bookstores all over North America regularly got nominated for awards since the turn of the century. The problem came with what the Sad Puppies did next. First, they insisted that Someone Must Be To Blame—when the phenomenon mostly involves objective factors. Secondly, being themselves mostly right wing in their political views, they jumped to the conclusion—based on the flimsiest evidence; mostly that some people had been nasty to Larry Correia on some panels at the Reno Worldcon—that the bias against their fiction in the awards was due to political persecution. Neither proposition can stand up to scrutiny, as I have now demonstrated repeatedly in the course of these essays….

One more thing needs to be said. The biggest problem in all of this is that way, way too many people—authors and awards-bestowers alike—have a view of this issue which… ah…

I’m trying to figure out a polite way of saying they have their heads up their asses…

Okay, I’ll say it this way. The problem is that way too many people approach this issue subjectively and emotionally rather than using their brains. With some authors, regardless of what they say in public, there’s a nasty little imp somewhere deep in the inner recesses of their scribbler’s soul that chitters at them that if they’re not winning awards there’s either something wrong with them or they’re being robbed by miscreants. Or, if they don’t sell particularly well but do get recognition when it comes to awards, there’s a peevish little gremlin whining that they’re not selling well either because somebody—publisher, agent, editor, whoever except it’s not them—is not doing their job or it’s because the reading public are a pack of morons.

Everybody needs to take a deep breath and relax. There are many factors that affect any author’s career and shape how well they sell and how often they get nominated for awards. Some of these factors are under an author’s control, but a lot of them aren’t. And, finally, there’s an inescapable element of chance involved in all of this.

The only intelligent thing for an author to do is, first, not take anything that happens (for good or ill) personally; secondly, try to build your career based on your strengths rather than fretting over your weaknesses.

(4) Craig Engler – “Dear Sad Puppies, I’d like to share some thoughts with you (Part 1)”

However, it’s possible to overdo it. The FAQ on the Hugo Awards site even has something to say about self promotional efforts: “Be careful. Excessively campaigning for a Hugo Award can be frowned upon by regular Hugo voters and has been known to backfire.” The words are italicized for emphasis not by me but by the person who wrote the FAQ. Note that the FAQ is addressed to the entire world, not to a specific group within fandom. In other words, anyone anywhere who excessively campaigns may face a backlash. It’s actually happened before….

That stance against campaigning has nothing to do with the personal beliefs or the politics of the campaigner, but rather their actions, i.e. campaigning to an excessive extent. And yes there was a lot more going on with Sad Puppies besides just campaigning, but even if that’s all that had ever happened, it was extremely doubtful voters would have responded favorably to Larry [Correia]’s campaign to get himself a Hugo….

I’ve been a Hugo voter off and on since 1988 when I attended my first Worldcon, and it’s always been widely known that voters react badly to campaigning. So had anyone done what Larry (and later on other Sad Puppies did), voters would have responded the same way. In fact, Larry isn’t even the first to try campaigning and have it not work. (Thus the reason it’s in a FAQ to begin with.)

So my thought to you is, while there was more going on around the vote than just Larry’s excessive campaigning (again, I’ll talk about that stuff in Part 2), we really never had to get past the campaigning issue to know that Larry’s tactics were simply not going to work. Not because of his politics, not because of his story telling ability, but because of his actions.

(5) What do we call this — a matho?

https://twitter.com/HermesMenusco/status/638418745145298945

(6) The Carl Brandon Society has issued a “Non-profit Status Update”.

Due to a misunderstanding between board members in the wake of a personnel transition, we did not ensure that our tax returns were filed properly for 2012 – 2014. (It is worth noting that tax returns for organizations as small as the Carl Brandon Society are done via a form called the e-postcard, which requires only basic information, and does not require any degree of complex accounting).

We discovered the oversight when the IRS administratively revoked our non-profit status and provided instructions to us on how to be reinstated. We have spent the time since then working toward reinstatement and taking steps to assure that this does not happen again. These steps include, but are not limited to: (1) doing a complete examination of our fiscal practices and financial controls, (2) getting a new treasurer with significant non-profit experience, as well as a legal background and experience tracking and analyzing financial records, and (3) doing a complete review of our bookkeeping and financial records for all the affected years. We are about to file detailed tax returns for the years in question along with an application for reinstatement as a non profit charitable organization. We expect to be reinstated without difficulty as soon as our paperwork is reviewed by the IRS. Charitable donations made during this time will be covered by that application.

The Carl Brandon Society Steering Committee apologizes to everyone concerned for not resolving this issue in a more timely manner. Though the revocation happened in 2013, it was retroactive to the date covered by the missed filing. The reinstatement, likewise, will be retroactive to the same date.

The public became aware that the Society had lost its 501(c)(3) status after donations were solicited in connection with John Scalzi’s offer to voice an audiobook — “Charity Drive for Con or Bust: An Audio Version of ‘John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author And I Myself Am Quite Popular’ Read by Me”

(7) Aristotle!

(8) Those E.T. the Extra Terrestrial Atari cartridges dug up in Alamogordo netted over $108,000 in an auction last year, Rolling Stone recalls:

Nearly 900 copies of the infamously terrible video game were sold on eBay after an April 2014 excavation in Alamogordo, New Mexico confirmed the urban legend that thousands of the cartridges were buried following the game’s critical and commercial failure…. The most an E.T. cartridge sold for at auction was $1,535.

“There’s 297 we’re still holding in an archive that we’ll sell at a later date when we decide what to do with them,” Lewandowski said. “I might sell those if a second movie comes out but for now we’re just holding them. The film company got 100 games, 23 went to museums and we had 881 that we actually sold.”

The city of Alamogordo will receive $65,000 from the sale, while the Tularosa Basin Historical Society gets over $16,000. The remainder of the money went towards shipping fees as buyers in 45 states and 14 countries scooped up copies of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.

(9) Coincidentally, the E.T. movie will be back in theaters for one day this October.

In conjunction with the Blu-ray release on October 9th and the film’s 30th anniversary, Fathom Events has announced that E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial will return to the big screen for one night only on October 3 at 7:00 p.m. local time with special matinee screenings in select theaters at 2:00 p.m. local time.

(10) Eric R. Sterner in “The Martian Message”  says he thinks movies do nothing to encourage space exploration.

Surely, several interests want to capitalize on the melding of film and speculative reality. Damon recently visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he talked about his role, and NASA’s website proudly uses the opportunity to explain the real NASA-developed technologies portrayed in the movie. It can only do a space advocate’s heart good when Hollywood seems to discover the same sense of excitement in space that we see and experience every day.

Sadly, if the space community seeks to turn The Martian into a commercial for sending people to Mars, we will fail miserably. The 2000 movie Castaway was nominated for multiple awards, including an Academy Award for Tom Hanks. It did not increase public support for sending people to deserted islands. Neither will The Martian bring them closer to Mars.

(11) Nerd Approved shows how you can get Serenity on your GPS.

You are seeing the Serenity instead of a car on this Garmin GPS image tweeted by Nathan Fillion. The picture was sent to him by Browncoat Greg H. and you can have it, too. All you need to do is download the image and then add it to your Garmin’s vehicles folder and you’ll be driving through the ‘verse. As far as finding a way to avoid the Reavers and outsmart the Alliance, you’re on your own.

(12) NPR interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin who has a new book coming out — Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story.

Interview Highlights

On the importance of “crowding” and “leaping”

Crowding is what Keats said when he said, “Load every rift with ore.” In other words, pack in all the richness you can. All great books are incredibly rich; each sentence can sort of be unpacked. But then also in telling a story, you’ve got to leap, you’ve got to leave out so much. And you’ve got to know which crag to leap to.

(12) Marc Scott Zicree posted a Special Space Command Update on his birthday, which included showing the birthday present he was given by John King Tarpinian (at :27).

(13) George R.R. Martin on Not A Blog“Next Year’s Hugos”

Let’s make it about the work. Let’s argue about the BOOKS. And yes, of course, it will be an argument. I may not like the stories you like. You may not like the stories I like. We can all live with that, I think. I survived the Old Wave/ New Wave debate. Hell, I enjoyed parts of it… because it was about literature, about prose style, characterization, storytelling. Some of the stuff that Jo Walton explores in her Alfie-winning Best Related Work, WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT? That’s the sort of debate we should be having.

The elimination of slates will be a huge step toward the end of hostilities.

But there’s a second step that’s also necessary. One I have touched on many times before. We have to put an end to the name-calling. To the stupid epithets.

I have seen some hopeful signs on that front in some of the Hugo round-ups I’ve read. Puppies and Puppy sympathizers using terms like Fan (with a capital), or trufan, or anti-Puppy, all of which I am fine with. I am not fine with CHORF, ASP, Puppy-kicker, Morlock, SJW, Social Justice Bully, and some of the other stupid, offensive labels that some Pups (please note, I said SOME) have repeatedly used for describe their opponents since this whole thing began. I am REALLY not fine with the loonies on the Puppy side who find even those insults too mild, and prefer to call us Marxists, Maoists, feminazis, Nazis, Christ-hating Sodomites, and the like. There have been some truly insane analogies coming from the kennels too — comparisons to World War II, to the Nazi death camps, to ethnic cleansing. Guy, come on, cool down. WE ARE ARGUING ABOUT A LITERARY AWARD THAT BEGAN AS AN OLDSMOBILE HOOD ORNAMENT. Even getting voted below No Award is NOT the same as being put on a train to Auschwitz, and when you type shit like that, well…

The Pups have often complained that they don’t get no respect… which has never actually been true, as the pre-Puppy awards nominations of Correia and Torgersen have proved… but never mind, the point here is that to get respect, you need to give respect.

[Thanks to Craig Engler, Martin Morse Wooster, and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Cubist.]

376 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/31 From the SJW Aisle at Victoria’s Secret

  1. Cmm on September 1, 2015 at 3:18 pm said:

    My favourite part of the JCW post is in the comments where he and his wife debate whether they are the Rebel Alliance ( hardy few fighting the monolith of received wisdom) or the Empire (source of all that is right and good because we blow up everyone who doesn’t agree). Guess which side JCW says they are?

    Inside every fundamentalist is an authoritarian who wants justification to demand we do everything his way.

    JCW thinks the empire are the good guys?

    Didn’t know he was a Clerks fan

  2. @Dawn: I’ve enjoyed reading Tanya Huff across several sub-genres of fantasy. I finished The Future Falls, as expected, I enjoyed it but won’t be nominating it for a Hugo. The series is a lot of fun IMHO and I suspect I’ll reread at some point. Magic, a number of paranormal creatures, music, family (good and bad), friendships, interesting relationships, good world building, crazy situations, humor, fairly light. Little violence, sex is off-screen, some profanity, some sqicky sexual relationship stuff (17/30 in love, marriages are mostly kept within the family, major rituals include sex, declared adult at 15 for purposes of rituals).

    Normally those sqicky things would really bother me. But for whatever reason, maybe because the characters exame and question them, they don’t. It’s only when I’m looking back on the series and thinking “what might be important info for someone to know” that those details come to mind.

  3. JCW is a deeply, deeply confused man. Can’t keep his Bible and his Inferno straight. Wants to punch fatally ill old men. Loves the anti-religion Empire, while hating atheists. Should we hate him for being a hate-monger, or pity him for having some defect of mind? Nah, let’s just ignore him.

    My days of taking Eric Flint seriously are coming to a middle. His statistics and the interpretation thereof suck. If we’re going strictly by shelf space, the winner ought to be J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts when she’s writing near future police procedural). There’s two of those a year and they’re all still available.

    I, too will con for 770’ers as much as possible.

    Worldcon is held indoors and in warm weather. I’m sure our under-table constrictor will be fine even in Helsinki.

    Has Trebek ever won a daytime Emmy? I used to know someone who used to work there, and they said he was a very hard worker, although he has a temper.

    GOD STALK.

  4. @Mark Dennehy

    Thanks! Amazon seems to have removed the option, and worldcat doesn’t have entries for individual shorts. Figuring out whether something is a Novella, Novelette or a Short Story isn’t going to be much fun if I can’t find something that handles shorter works.

    Crisis averted, the ISFDB may not have word counts but they do list whether it’s a novella or a novelette. Yay! 🙂

  5. In all fairness, Wright and Antonelli must be undergoing a bit of a crisis of faith right now: They were such fierce Catholics and suddenly they’re being told they actually are Hugo-nots.

  6. Well, Dante was slightly earlier even than Chaucer – but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, since different languages change in different ways and at different rates. (Personally, I find Chaucer’s Middle English fairly heavy going!)

  7. Microtherion: Please accept this internet from me. Kyra can spare one, I’m sure.

    I believe the Dante = Shakespeare analogy to be the correct one; at least that’s what my brother who took college Italian says. Not counting dialects.

  8. I volunteer as tribute! Er, to attend cons with fellow vile ones. Also, where possible, kaffeeklatsches, coffee talks, impromptu lunches or dinners, and so forth.

    Microtherion: groan!

  9. Once upon a time, at least in the midwest, high school English classes were forced to memorize the first 18 lines of the Canterbury Tales. I have no objection to this even now, except that very few of those who were forced to memorize were taught correct Middle English pronunciation . . . and none of them (that I ever met, including myself in that group) were given understanding of Chaucer to realize just how funny those lines were. Which kind of missed the point entirely, in my opinion.

  10. I suspect that a better equivalence is Ariosto = Shakespeare; my sense of Dante is that he’s probably more like Malory in terms of where he stands in relation to language change.

  11. @ Tasha:

    do you make it a habit to threaten to kill people on Whatever? Earlier this year on a thread about the Hugos you threatened my life if I put you on the 2016 ballot.

    Hm. To threaten one person with death on Whatever may be regarded as a misstep. Two threaten two begins to look like carelessness.

  12. “Should we hate him for being a hate-monger, or pity him for having some defect of mind?”

    Right now I’m leaning toward pitying Laertes for some defect of mind.

    (Hang on, Laertes! We are consulting fine experts, with all due modesty, the finest experts in the land.)

  13. I was a languages major and had to read Dante “in the original” to get through one of my classes. I couldn’t make head nor tails of the language, and only survived because my professor was pretty sympathetic to that problem.

  14. “And I’m so tired of this nonsense.”

    As am I. Because what all this is, is a variation of the Author’s Big Mistake. Throwing a temper tantrum because the readers or reviewers don’t appreciate your genius is never going to work. All it does is drive readers away from your work and convince reviewers to stop reviewing. All that the Puppies have achieved is the befouling of their reputations and a exponential increase in the number of readers who will never, ever touch their works again (or for the first time), and will further more say “Oh, that lot” in tones of derision when their friends mention the Puppies in conversation. This will not help their sales.

    A few years back, a stupid, belligerent and extremely nasty self-published author set up a site called Stop the Good Reads Bullies (info here) to attack reader reviewers and support tantrum throwing twits like Messrs Torgersen, Wright and co. Her successes to date include being thrown off Goodreads, decreasing the number of review sites willing to touch self-pubbed books to nearly zero, and attracting the support and attention of the increasingly out of touch with reality Anne Rice (who also hates readers who don’t like her books and has been campaigning in Wright like terms for their extermination.) The amount of illwill and sheer harm this one idiot and her acolytes caused was quite incredible – and to no good effect. That author’s books are still selling in singles, her name is a hissing and an abomination, and her tantrum has ensured no publisher will ever touch her.

    I suspect that the Puppies may end up the same way (though being white men, of course they will be more insulated from the effects of their behaviour than a woman will be.)

    One can sympathise with a crying baby for only so long, before anyone but the parent walks away, hands over their ears, saying “Dear god, will no one shut that thing up?”

  15. Totally in if Laura Resnick is on any kind of panel or Kaffee Klatch at the next Worldcon. I don’t really go to other cons… yet…

    In the absence of that (checks wallet, notes that yes, got paid by day job)… we could buy a book of hers. I note that there’s an app called Kobo offering ebooks where you can get a $5 credit off any book, including, say, Disappearing Nightly…

    http://www.lauraresnick.com/esther-diamond-novels/

  16. @Ann Somerville

    I don’t know if you were ever in Anne Rice’s fandom, but the level of hidden links and passwords and suchlike people had put together to protect themselves from roving Anne Rice lawyers was amazing. I’ve never seen another fandom like it.

  17. I don’t know if you were ever in Anne Rice’s fandom, but the level of hidden links and passwords and suchlike people had put together to protect themselves from roving Anne Rice lawyers was amazing. I’ve never seen another fandom like it.

    The way she went after fanfiction-writers… I knew a few people who were involved in that fandom and it all went massively underground with secret mailinglists and such. In the end my friends gave up because the hassle and stress just became too much.

    I was actually surprised that there’s some VC fanfic up on AO3.

  18. Cmm on September 1, 2015 at 3:18 pm said:

    My favourite part of the JCW post is in the comments where he and his wife debate whether they are the Rebel Alliance ( hardy few fighting the monolith of received wisdom) or the Empire (source of all that is right and good because we blow up everyone who doesn’t agree). Guess which side JCW says they are?

    Inside every fundamentalist is an authoritarian who wants justification to demand we do everything his way

    .

    Why not both? The Puppies managed to both claim to be representing the silent majority and a persecuted minority. They can be the Empire and Rebels, fittingly making themselves their own worst enemies

  19. “I don’t know if you were ever in Anne Rice’s fandom”

    Good dog, no! But I know from FFA that many are battle-scarred from their experiences, and having seen Anne Rice in full spate, I’m not surprised. That woman scares the hell out of me.

  20. (Even though eastern Washington looks nothing like Canterbury, Kent, my excuse is that both stock good ale:)

    A TEXAN there was, and that a wrathy man,
    That from the time that he first began
    To riden out, he loved asperity,
    Floridness and fustian, clashing and contention.
    Full worthy was he in his Lorde’s war,
    And thereto had he ridden, no man fared farther
    As well in Christendom as in Heatheness,
    And ever honour’d for his crankiness
    At Spokane he was when it was lost.

  21. @Zil: You know, I don’t think I’ve read a proper summary/rec for Namesake before, even though I’ve seen it floating around as a general “this is good, read it” before.

    That’s probably because it’s impossible to do a decent summary. There’s institutions from here to Burbank filled with people who came to grief trying to do a one paragraph summary of that work. It’s a world hopping, literary referential, urban magic conspiracy meditation on selfhood…unm…unm.. aaaaaargh!

    In other news, I’m conceiving the idea of a small business, where we hire ourselves out to publishers as ready-made crowds for readings, signings and kaffeeklatsches. I’ll make a mint…or at least get to have coffee with authors.

  22. As I understand it, JCW conceives himself to represent the pre-Palpatinian Old Republic, commanding a Death Star. Because in this as in other things, canon is just a guideline for him.

  23. @Microtherion on September 1, 2015 at 3:43 pm said:

    In all fairness, Wright and Antonelli must be undergoing a bit of a crisis of faith right now: They were such fierce Catholics and suddenly they’re being told they actually are Hugo-nots.

    I bet paulcarp wishes he’d thought of that one.

    And I would like to join the chorus saying, 3 at a klatch and 6 at a reading is not at all unusual, even for writers who are considerably more talented and pleasant than Mr. Antonelli.

  24. Been the reading the text from James Quinn and this part is interesting:

    “Remember, according to my best analysis, there were about 100 committed Sads and about 40 committed Rabids, yet because the sad slate had fewer than 5 candidates in many categories, there were a number of rabid-but-not-sad finalists, giving an exaggerated impression of Rabid strength.”

    This is a lot less than previous thought.

  25. Daniela:The way she went after fanfiction-writers… I knew a few people who were involved in that fandom and it all went massively underground with secret mailinglists and such. In the end my friends gave up because the hassle and stress just became too much.

    I was actually surprised that there’s some VC fanfic up on AO3.

    It always makes me sad to think of all the writers and works that should by all rights have a thriving fanfic-based fandom but only have a fraction of it because of their writer’s (or other party’s) stance on fan works. Even those that have lightened up often have a less thriving fandom than they should.

    Not thinking of Anne Rice so much as Robin Hobb(who I think is still anti-fic?) and Mercedes Lackey(who has lightened up).

  26. @McJulie

    And I would like to join the chorus saying, 3 at a klatch and 6 at a reading is not at all unusual, even for writers who are considerably more talented and pleasant than Mr. Antonelli.

    Anyone have numbers or reviews of JCW or LJL’s readings?

  27. Does Robin Hobb throw lawyers at fanfic authors, though?

    Rice is, as they say, cray-cray. One could argue she has been, but not in such a lashing out kind of way. I definitely would not continue to be a fan of anyone who caused me to have to set up virtual speakeasies just to discuss the work.

    Thus it’s going for Puppies, hopefully sans lawyers.

    3 is a fairly typical number for kaffeeklatches at Worldcon. There’s so much more going on to see at every hour of the day. A popular author at a regional con is going to have an overflow of sign-ups. I’ve sat down at KK’s where the author had only one or two at the table out of pity (and because it’s a guaranteed quiet place to sit for a while!). Sometimes they turn out to be interesting people. And sometimes the KKs turn into lunches, which is also nice.

    Rick Moen: huzzah.

  28. @Bruce Baugh:

    Rick Moen, that was freakin’ wonderful.

    I am absolutely not going to do the Wyf of Portugal’s Tale. Nope. Not even if you double-dare me.

  29. Since Mike promoted one of my comments to the front page, I guess I’m one of The Elite now.

    So, to celebrate my new status as a member of the inner circle of the SJW/Tor cabal,

    1) I created a Gravitar. (Same as my LibraryThing profile photo, and my LJ avatar); and
    2) I gave in to peer pressure and tracked down a copy of God Stalk(!).

  30. As I recall, the Wright and Lamplighter KKs were late additions and were only promoted via official Worldcon channels in one edition of the newsletter under “Program Changes” (which would’ve been the same for any author in those circumstances save for the most popular; i.e. if GRRM suddenly decided that Friday was KK day and did 10 in a row newly added ones, heck yes we would’ve upped that to article or briefly noted status). In fairness, that could’ve cut down their audience, although of course they may have heavily promoted them via their own social media accounts.

  31. ‘As You Know’ Bob: What is your theory as to why I have to manually approve everyone one of your comments? You’re not in moderation. Or at least not on purpose.

  32. Re: low audiences. Reminds me of two incidents.

    1) at the 1983 Worldcon, I was getting a hot dog from the gopher hole when GOH John Brunner walked in and asked me and the person in charge of the GH (being the only two in the room) if this was where he was supposed to be in a couple of hours. He went on to explain that Jerry Pournelle had been putting up signs in the SFWA suite that the pros should come down at [time] to thank the gophers. GH head and I assured him it is. He left. Me and GH head “Do you know *anything* about this?” “Nope”.

    I spent the next two hours tracking down as many gophers as I could to tell them to show up, promising it’d count as a volunteer hour. I believe we managed to get just a few more than the number of authors who showed up. Great idea by Pournelle, but he apparently was under the impression that gophers just sat around the hole all day, rather than popping in and getting an assignment / snack and leaving.

    2) This year’s San Diego Comic-Con had a Star Wars panel in the 6,000 seating Hall H with Hamill, Fisher, and Ford. And as a climax, the whole audience was invited to walk over behind the Convention Center where they were given light up light sabers and treated to a SW-themed concert by the San Diego Symphony.

    Sounds great….except that wasn’t the final event of the day in Hall H. And everyone assumed it was full and would stay so (as is usually the case), so only a few people were waiting for the next item. So, Kevin Smith, who usually packs the place, comes out and sees a total audience of about 300 in a room for 6,000….

  33. Mike: What is your theory as to why I have to manually approve everyone one of your comments? You’re not in moderation.

    Gee, I dunno (…but I’ve occasionally wondered…) – do I consistently use words that are on The Forbidden Lists? Is it the quote marks in my user handle?

    I hope to be an otherwise well-behaved commenter….

  34. Hampus Eckerman on September 1, 2015 at 5:20 pm said:

    Been the reading the text from James Quinn and this part is interesting:

    “Remember, according to my best analysis, there were about 100 committed Sads and about 40 committed Rabids, yet because the sad slate had fewer than 5 candidates in many categories, there were a number of rabid-but-not-sad finalists, giving an exaggerated impression of Rabid strength.”

    This is a lot less than previous thought.

    Depends on what he means by ‘committed’. I went through the Best Fan Writer nomination numbers yesterday and it looked more like 130 Sads + 60 Rabids. It was an odd category because the nominee who was only on the Rabid slate didn’t get close to being nominated and several of the people on the Sad slate were notable Sad advocates (Cedar S, Amanda G and Dave F).

    I don’t know how consistent those numbers are with the other categories.

    (Also to me it looked like very few people outside of the Puppies nominated multiple people.)

  35. Re: starting gratuitous fights-

    Why is Robert Jordan the most important Fantasy writer since Tolkein (little biased here) ?

    I will cut you.

  36. I liked Nimona – My daughter loved it.

    “Nobody’s ever been killed by one little arrow!”
    “Yes they have!!!! That is the point of arrows!”

  37. One thing that bugs me is that the puppies never accept that one of the big reasons why the anti-slate vote was so successful is because Vox Day’s slate was a big pile of self-promotion, and John C. Wright’s nominations were in the thick of it. I view the No Awards this year as being the same sort of response the Hugo voters had for the Scientologists stuffing the ballot box for one of Hubbard’s books some years ago.

    If there had not been slate nominations and one of JCW’s works had made it on the ballot this year, I might not have ranked it below No Award, but I was definitely motivated to place No Award above anything published by VD’s publishing house, and I’d do the same to Tor if the Making Light crowd had an anti-puppy slate with 3-5 nominees in each category dominated by Tor published works (not that I expect them to ever publish a slate). I didn’t vote No Award across the board, but I definitely voted No Award above anything I felt was self-promotion by the slate creators. That JCW blog post shows that he didn’t get it, and that thefederalist.com guy didn’t get it, but I think any comments pointing it out will be lost on their readers anyway.

  38. Is Laertes the first victim in a Puppy campaign to brainwash File770 regulars into being pro-Puppy..? Should I be checking my locks?

  39. (Also to me it looked like very few people outside of the Puppies nominated multiple people.)

    When I looked at the stuff from 1984, the mean number of nominations on a ballot was about two per category – there are people who fill every spot, and people who will fill only one on the entire ballot.

  40. Why is Robert Jordan the most important Fantasy writer since Tolkein (little biased here) ?

    Because it all but killed epic fantasy? 😉

  41. Cat: Laertes? You are beginning to frighten me. Are you okay?

    Meredith: Is Laertes the first victim in a Puppy campaign to brainwash File770 regulars into being pro-Puppy..? Should I be checking my locks?

    None of the posts by “Laertes” in this thread are consistent with those made by the regular File770 commenter known as “Laertes”. I’ve concluded that it is a different person, who’s posting using that username.

  42. StephenfromOttawa: At this point a lot of comments from Torgersen and some others appear to be mainly just lashing out, not well considered analysis.

    And this would be different from all their posts the last 5+ months… how, exactly?

  43. Guess: @MikeGlyer: How about adding blog entries discussing specific SF books and genres? There really isn’t anything left to say about the Sad Puppies. Some topics could be […..] Lots of stuff we can discuss. Lets get into angry red faced fights about books instead of the Hugo fights. There is nothing left to say. Everyone is just repeating what has been said.

    You really haven’t been reading File770 much during the last 5 months, have you? We’ve had lengthy dialogues in many threads about huge numbers of SFF books, YA and Juvenile SFF, LGBTQ SFF, Hard SF, the virtues and flaws of various SFF subgenres, etc. We’ve had The History of the Hugos. We’ve had Kyra’s SF and Fantasy brackets.

    Much of this has been intertwined with commentary on the Hugos and the Puppies. If you’re just reading Mike’s main posts, you’ve been missing it all.

  44. If you’re just reading Mike’s main posts, you’ve been missing it all.

    Yes. As at Making Light and at MetaFilter, if you’re only reading the main post and not engaging with the comments, you’re missing most of the good stuff.

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