Pixel Scroll 9/14/19 We Are All In The Pixel, But Some Of Us Are Looking At The Scrolls

(1) ONE STOP SHOPPING. [Item by Jonathan Cowie.] SF2 Concatenation’s Autumn 2019 edition is up. Voluminous seasonal news and reviews page of both SF and science which includes the major UK SF/fantasy imprint book releases between now and New Year.  (Many of these will be available as imports in N. America and elsewhere.)

(2) LEM V. DICK. [Editor’s note: I apologize for what amounts to misspelling, but characters that WordPress would display as question marks have been changed to a letter of the alphabet without marks.]

[Item by Jan Vanek Jr.] Yesterday the English-language website of the Polish magazine Przekrój published (and started promoting on Facebook, hence my knowledge) the translation of a 2,700-word excerpt (not a self-contained “chapter” as they claim) from Wojciech Orlinski’s 2017 biography of Stanislaw Lem detailing what led to “the famous Lem-Dick imbroglio” with PKD’s “famous Lem report to the FBI”: “access to previously unpublished letters […] resulted in what is likely the first accurate description of the incident, as well as the ultimate explanation as to how the concept of ‘foreign royalties under communism’ is almost as much of a mess as ‘fine dining under communism’ (but not quite as fine a mess)”:

…It all began with Lem’s depiction of Dick – in the third of his great essay collections, Science Fiction and Futurology as little more than a talentless hack. Lem had a poor opinion of almost all American authors, and never thought much of the literary genre of which he himself was an exponent (think of his equally critical view of Pirx the Pilot, for example, or Return from the Stars)….

I found it a quite informative and interesting read, although “Lem’s unfortunate expulsion from the SFWA” that ensued is mentioned only briefly and I think misleadingly (I have checked the Polish book and there is nothing more about it, but it has been described in American sources, many of them online).

(3) ABOUT AO3’S HUGO AWARD. The Organization for Transformative Works has clarified to Archive of Our Own participants — “Hugo Award – What it Means”.

We’re as excited as you are about the AO3’s Hugo win, and we are shouting it to the rafters! We are grateful to the World Science Fiction Society for recognizing the AO3 with the award, as well as to the many OTW volunteers who build and maintain the site, and all of the amazing fans who post and enjoy works on it.

The World Science Fiction Society has asked us to help them get the word out about what the award represented—specifically, they want to make sure people know that the Hugo was awarded to the AO3, and not to any particular work(s) hosted on it. Therefore, while we can all be proud of the AO3’s Hugo win and we can all be proud of what we contributed to making it possible, the award does not make any individual fanwork or creator “Hugo winners”—the WSFS awarded that distinction to the AO3 as a whole. In particular, the WSFS asked us to convey this reminder so that no one mistakenly describes themselves as having personally won a Hugo Award.

Thanks for sharing our enthusiasm, and consider yourselves reminded! We appreciate every one of your contributions.

So far there are 80 comments, any number by Kevin Standlee making Absolutely Clear Everybody Must Understand Things Exactly The Way He Does. One reply says, “You aren’t doing a particularly good job of reading the room here.”

(4) ARISIA PERSISTED. Arisia 2020 has issued its first online Progress Report. Key points: (1) It’s happening! (2) It’s (back) at the Westin Boston Waterfront. (3) The headliners are Cadwell Turnbull, Author Guest of Honor, Kristina Carroll, Artist Guest of Honor, and Arthur Chu, Fan Guest of Honor.

(5) BOO!  LAist primes fans for Universal Studios’ Halloween mazes: “Halloween Horror Nights: A Photo Tour Of The New ‘Ghostbusters’ & ‘Us’ Mazes At Universal Studios”.

Halloween’s almost here… well, OK, it’s more than a month away, but that means it’s time for Halloween haunts — aka Halloween mazes, aka scary Halloween things at theme parks and the like, to start.

Halloween Horror Nights has been taking over Universal Studios Hollywood for 21 years, and we got the chance to take a behind-the-scenes tour of two of the brand new mazes, Ghostbusters and Us. We were guided through by Creative Director John Murdy, the man in charge of creating the stories and the scares inside all of the mazes.

He works with an art director to design every moment, writing treatments for each attraction than can run up to 100 pages.

“It’s a narrative from the guest’s POV — everything I see, hear, smell, etcetera, as if I’m going through the maze,” Murdy said. “But it also has a very elaborate technical breakdown by scene, by discipline, down to the timecode of the audio cues.”

(6) DUBLIN 2019. Cora Buhlert’s report begins with — “WorldCon 77 in Dublin, Part 1: The Good…”. There’s also a shorter version for the Speculative Fiction Showcase: “Cora’s Adventures at Worldcon 77 in Dublin, Ireland”. Each has lots of photos.

…On Wednesday, the day before WorldCon officially started, I helped with move in and set-up at Point Square. This involved carrying boxes, assembling shelves for the staff lounge and crafting area, taping down table cloths and helping to set up the Raksura Colony Tree model. This was my first time volunteering at a WorldCon and it was a great experience. Not only do you get to help to make a great project like WorldCon happen, no, you also get to meet a lot of lovely people while volunteering. Especially if you’re new to WorldCon and don’t know anybody yet, I recommend volunteering as a way to meet people and make friends. What is more, I also got a handful of groats (which I used to buy a very pretty necklace in the dealers room) and a cool t-shirt.

(7) MEMORIAL. Jim C. Hines tweeted the link to his post about the Memorial held for his wife, Amy, on September 8, a touching and highly personal tribute.

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • September 14, 2008The Hunger Games novel hit bookstores. (For some reason, the bookstores did not hit back.)

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born September 14, 1915 Douglas Kennedy. No major SFF roles that I see but he’s been in a number of films of a genre nature: The Way of All Flesh, The Ghost Breakers, The Mars InvadersThe Land UnknownThe Lone Ranger and the Lost City of GoldThe Alligator People and The Amazing Transparent Man. Series wise, he had one-offs on Alcoa PresentsScience Fiction TheatreAlfred Hitchcock Presents and The Outer Limits. (Died 1973.)
  • Born September 14, 1919 Claire P. Beck. Editor of the Science Fiction Critic, a fanzine which published in four issues Hammer and Tongs, the first work of criticism devoted to American SF. It was written by his brother Clyde F. Beck. Science Fiction Critic was published from 1935 to 1938. (Died 1999.)
  • Born September 14, 1927 Martin Caidin. His best-known novel is Cyborg which was the basis for The Six Million Dollar Man franchise. He wrote two novels in the Indiana Jones franchise and one in the Buck Rogers one as well. He wrote myriad other sf novels as well. (Died 1997.)
  • Born September 14, 1932 Joyce Taylor, 87. She first shows as Princess Antillia in Atlantis, the Lost Continent. Later genre appearances were The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the first English language Beauty and the Beast film, the horror film Twice-Told Tales and the Men into Space SF series. 
  • Born September 14, 1936 Walter Koenig, 83. Best-known for his roles as Pavel Chekov in the original Trek franchise and Alfred Bester on Babylon 5Moontrap, a SF film with him and Bruce Campbell, would garner a 28% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and InAlienable which he executive produced, wrote and acts in has no rating there. 
  • Born September 14, 1941 Bruce Hyde. Patterns emerge in doing these Birthdays. One of these patterns is that original Trek had a lot of secondary performers who had really short acting careers. He certainly did. He portrayed Lt. Kevin Riley in two episodes, “The Naked Time” and “The Conscience of the King” and the rest of his acting career consisted of eight appearances, four of them as Dr. Jeff Brenner.  He acted for less than two years in ‘65 and ‘66, before returning to acting thirty-four years later to be in The Confession of Lee Harvey Oswald which is his final role. (Died 2015.)
  • Born September 14, 1947 Sam Neill, 72. Best known for role of Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park which he reprised in Jurassic Park III. He was also in Omen III: The Final Conflict, Possession, Memoirs of an Invisible ManSnow White: A Tale of TerrorBicentennial ManLegend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’HooleThe Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas BoxThor: Ragnarok and Peter Rabbit. 
  • Born September 14, 1961 Justin Richards, 58. Clute at ESF says “Richards is fast and competent.” Well I can certain say he’s fast as he’s turned out thirty-five Doctor Who novels which Clute thinks are for the YA market between 1994 and 2016. And he has other series going as well! Another nineteen novels written, and then there’s the Doctor Who non-fiction which runs to over a half dozen works.  

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • Frank and Ernest ask deep questions about Pokémon.
  • A Tom Gauld cartoon about The Testaments launch in The Guardian.

(11) LUCAS MUSEUM. George Lucas, his wife Mellody Hobson, and the mayor dropped by the site yesterday to see how things are going: “Force Is With Them! Construction Of George Lucas Museum In Full Swing”.

Construction of the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is in full swing.

On Friday, Lucas — along with his wife and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti — watched as construction crews helped bring his vision to life.

And he thanked them for the tireless effort.

“You’re doing the impossible — thank you so much,” Lucas said.

“Millions of people will be inspired by this building. We were just in our board meeting for the museum and George said you are the artists so you’re the artists of this art museum,” says Mellody Hobson, Co-CEO of Ariel Investments and the museum’s co-founder.

(12) LISTEN TO LIEN. Henry Lien is the Special Guest Star on this week’s episode of  The Write Process podcast, hosted by the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program — “Henry Lien on Worldbuilding, Puzzle Stories, Middle Grade, & Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions”

Henry Lien teaches law and creative writing at UCLA Extension. A private art dealer, he is the author of the Peasprout Chen middle grade fantasy series, which received New York Times acclaim and starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist.

(13) COSPLAY ID’S. SYFY Wire has collected all the tweeted photos — “Detroit high school encourages students to dress as pop culture icons for ID photos”.

High school can be a turbulent time for any budding teenager, but when you’re allowed to dress up as your favorite movie or television character, facing picture day isn’t the daunting challenge it once was. Per a report from The Huffington Post, North Farmington High School in the suburbs of Detroit allowed its senior pupils to assume the persona of their favorite pop culture icon for the sake of ID photographs. What followed was a parade of Woodys (Toy Story), Shuris (Black Panther) Fionas (Shrek), creepy twins (The Shining), and so many more!

(14) GUTS. In the Washington Post, Michael Cavna profiles YA graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier, whose autobiographical graphic novels have sold 13.5 million copies and  who attracted an audience of 4,000 to her talk at the National Book Festival. “Raina Telgemeier became a hero to millions of readers by showing how uncomfortable growing up can be”.

…Now, because her fans kept asking, she is getting more personal than ever. The Eisner Award-winning author who launched her publishing empire with 2010?s “Smile,” about her years-long dental adventures as a kid, is prepared to bare new parts of her interior world with “Guts,” available Tuesday, which centers on how fear affected her body.

 “This is the reality of my life,” Telgemeier told her fans. She quickly got to the heart and GI tract of the matter: “I was subject to panic attacks and [was] worrying that something was really wrong with me.”…

(15) SIGNAL BOOST. Naomi Kritzer offers an incentive for supporting a cause that needs a cash infusion.

(16) MARATHON SITTINGS. The Hollywood Reporter considers “The Long Game: Super-Sized Movies Are Testing the Patience of Audiences”.

And there may be a financial cost. Over the Sept. 6-8 weekend, New Line and director Andy Muschietti’s It: Chapter Two opened to $91 million domestically, a 26 percent decline from the first It, which debuted to $123.4 million on the same weekend in 2017. The sequel ran a hefty 169 minutes, 34 minutes longer than its predecessor.

“Andy had a lot of story to tell in concluding his adaptation of Stephen King’s book, which is more than 1,100 pages,” says Jeff Goldstein, chief of distribution for Warner Bros., New Line’s parent. “We strategically added more shows and locations to counterbalance losing a show on each screen.”

Adds a rival studio executive regarding It: Chapter Two, “look, $91 million is a great number. But anytime the second film in a hoped-for franchise goes down — and not up — that’s not what you wish for. And I do think the fact that it was so long didn’t help.”

(17) COLBERT. Stephen Colbert’s “Meanwhile…” news roundup includes a furry joke related to the movie Cats, and a bit on “The 5D Porn Cinema No One Asked For.” These items start at 2.02 — here on YouTube.

(18) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Cinema verite of author Liz Hand on Vimeo. A 5-minute video of Hand at work and play

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Daniel Dern, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Matthew Johnson.]

747 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/14/19 We Are All In The Pixel, But Some Of Us Are Looking At The Scrolls

  1. If I remember correctly, it wasn’t until Tingle really started to troll the puppies that love for him became real. Before that, there were more anger.

  2. Farasha: I was there for that nomination and do distinctly remember there was a loud objection to Chuck Tingle’s nomination precisely because some people felt the inclusion of parody erotica denigrated the prestige of the Hugos.

    I absolutely do have a problem that shitty porn will forever appear on the official Hugo records. That will always continue to upset me. I don’t have an objection to porn existing, but I do object to work that is nowhere even in the vicinity of Hugo-worthy being cheated onto the Hugo ballot by a bunch of malicious vandals. I also have a problem with the fact that a bunch of the other shitty works cheated onto the ballot by the Puppies will forever appear on the official Hugo records.

    On the other hand, I will adore Chuck Tingle forever for the way that he refused to be used by the Puppies and spent more than a year mocking and ridiculing them, the way that he took what was really an awful thing for the people who care about the Hugo Awards and turned it into lemonade that made a horrible situation a little less horrible for us. I think that his Fan Writer nomination for the following year was absolutely deserved, and I am proud to have his name forever in the official Hugo records for that.

  3. @Farasha —

    I’m not sure this is the argument you think it is, since I was there for that nomination and do distinctly remember there was a loud objection to Chuck Tingle’s nomination precisely because some people felt the inclusion of parody erotica denigrated the prestige of the Hugos. Especially when he released “Pounded in the Butt by my Hugo Nomination.”

    You do remember that Tingle was nominated for a fan writer Hugo the next year, right?

    I think a lot of us making the joke were essentially holding up a crayon drawing.

    But the WSFS can’t be expected to look at each individual author using the label and magically determine whether that particular author is the equivalent of a crayon drawing or not. No, all they can do is look at the community as a whole and say, “yeah, that’s too close to the realm of possibility to be safely taken as a joke”.

    But I do think you make a salient point that if there was no chance someone from outside both communities looking at the work and saying oh sure, I could see how that could happen, less people would be mad.

    Right. Just put “self-pubbed authors” in the place of “AO3 contributors” and then see how funny you think the “joke” actually is.

    You guys (I use “you guys” loosely) are mad because some unscrupulous asshats decided to cash in on the achievement.

    Ehhhh, roughly, for loose meanings of the term “cash in”.

    And don’t forget the upset caused by the many offensive responses to Kevin’s postings. That made everything MUCH worse.

    We’re (again, loosely) mad because it feels like the big kid on the block came by and told us to stop having fun.

    Except NOBODY actually did this. This is where you guys started going off the rails. “Don’t mess with our trademark” is not at all the same thing as “stop having fun”. It is only the same thing as “stop having fun in a way that hurts somebody else”.

    You guys got more mad that our response to (perceiving) being told to stop having fun was “fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

    Yes.

    We got more mad when someone we didn’t know who clearly wasn’t part of our community came into our space to tell us How To Behave.

    Again, nobody actually “came into your space to tell you how to behave”. Only to tell you that your fun was hurting other people.

    You keep ignoring that very important point. Your (general “you”, not specific) fun is hurting other people. And your (general “you”) responses to being told that you’re hurting other people is to ridicule and lie about them.

    Waaaaaaaay out of bounds.

  4. RedWombat: JJ, you are tarring all of AO3 as “they.”

    Sorry, I have been trying really hard in my comments to make it clear that I’m referring to people who have done certain things, and not to all AO3 members as a group. I will try harder.

  5. As for the question of this going on for days and days and days as somehow being extra disrespectful of Standlee or the Hugo’s or WSFS or whoever is supposedly being disrespected, I can’t keep track any more…um…have y’all noticed this thread that we’re in? Right now? That’s gone on for days? And there are orders of magnitude more AO3 people than there are Filers, all of whom are undoubtedly busy with their own lives and did not necessarily see the not-official-whatever-it-was as soon as it was posted. All those people get to say “what the hell tone-deaf nonsense is this!?” in their own time.

    Like…I feel that part of the disconnect here is that some of y’all do not actually fathom what TWO MILLION USERS looks like in practice. Can someone who’s good at scientific notation run me out what fraction WSFS’s top attendance of 10K?

  6. Sigh. Contrarius, yet again, NO ONE in an official capacity actually said “Don’t mess with our trademark.” You are getting mad at people for failing to agree to do something that no one speaking for WSFS in an official capacity has asked them to do yet.

  7. @RedWombat —

    I can’t keep track any more…um…have y’all noticed this thread that we’re in? Right now? That’s gone on for days?

    Nobody is trying to handwave away the discussion here as a mere “kneejerk reaction”.

  8. @RedWombat —

    Sigh. Contrarius, yet again, NO ONE in an official capacity actually said “Don’t mess with our trademark.”

    Do I really need to preface each and every one of my statements with an “I’m only paraphrasing here” disclaimer? Seriously, I think all the folks taking part in this discussion are plenty intelligent enough to figure that out.

    You are getting mad at people for failing to agree to do something that no one speaking for WSFS in an official capacity has asked them to do yet.

    You mean the way that a bunch of AO3 commenters are getting mad at Kevin and WSFS for supposedly saying things that nobody has actually said?

  9. If every single person on AO3 was allowed one single solitary second for a knee jerk reaction, they would be entitled to a thread lasting over twenty-three days.

  10. Contrarius: “Don’t mess with our trademark” is not at all the same thing as “stop having fun”. It is only the same thing as “stop having fun in a way that hurts somebody else”.

    And this is where the big disconnect occurs. Because a lot of AO3 members regard calling themselves Hugo Award Winners as simply harmless joking, and a lot of WSFS members regard it as something that is hurtful, and harmful to the Hugo Awards.

    I understand that those people think it is simply harmless joking, but when they’ve been told repeatedly that it’s hurtful and harmful and then double-down on it, it makes them look like really shitty human beings, and it’s hard to feel that they’re deserving of the respect and courtesy they’re demanding.

  11. @RedWombat —

    If every single person on AO3 was allowed one single solitary second for a knee jerk reaction, they would be entitled to a thread lasting over twenty-three days.

    No. You’re forgetting the magic of the internet. All those bazillions of AO3 members can read and comment at essentially the same time — they don’t have to do it singly in neat little rows of consecutive comments. Time gets compressed on the net — that’s why flame wars can spread so quickly.

  12. @Hampus Eckerman:

    If I remember correctly, it wasn’t until Tingle really started to troll the puppies that love for him became real. Before that, there were more anger.

    Indeed. That was when the Sad Puppies were trying for realsies to slate such things on the ballot as they could in an attempt to humiliate the fandom that had rejected them so firmly, and to give, or so they thought, no other option but to vote for their works THIS time.

    And I remember the initial community reaction to Tingle’s work on the ballot was upset and angry and embarrassed.

    But Chuck Tingle turned out to have a magnificent sense of humor about himself and endeared himself to the SF community by turning out to be a good-humored, if weird, open-minded person who genuinely seems to believe that love conquers all. It was a most amazing piece of serendipity.

  13. And if every person on AO3 took a consecutive day to think about their response, it would take 5479 years!
    And if each of them were laid end to end, assuming an average height of five feet, they would stretch 3048 kilometers! 1895 miles!
    If each of them took a single step, we would collectively travel 1806 kilometers! That’s 204 Everests!
    And if we stacked all the AO3 authors vertically, the ones on the bottom would die.

  14. @RedWombat: Like…I feel that part of the disconnect here is that some of y’all do not actually fathom what TWO MILLION USERS looks like in practice. Can someone who’s good at scientific notation run me out what fraction WSFS’s top attendance of 10K?

    10,000 / 2,000,000 = 0.005, or 5 * 10^(-3), or half a percent.

    Martin

  15. @RedWombat —

    And if we stacked all the AO3 authors vertically, the ones on the bottom would die.

    How many would die, and how quickly? And would they be stacked randomly, or by seniority, or by some other metric? And how would we stabilize the stack to make sure it didn’t fall over?

    Which reminds me of one of my favorite sff quotes ever, which I’ve posted on 770 before — from The God Eaters by Jesse Hajicek:

    ““Why?”
    Kieran grinned. “‘Cause you can’t dance, it’s too wet to plow, and it’s a little windy to be stacking chickens.”

  16. @Contrarius

    Again, nobody actually “came into your space to tell you how to behave”. Only to tell you that your fun was hurting other people.

    You keep ignoring that very important point. Your (general “you”, not specific) fun is hurting other people. And your (general “you”) responses to being told that you’re hurting other people is to ridicule and lie about them.

    Waaaaaaaay out of bounds.

    I think this is a big part of the disconnect. Internet commenters being rude is something everyone can agree is not okay (though Kevin didn’t exclusively receive rude responses, there were commenters that were attempting to engage in good faith). However, it wasn’t made clear to the AO3 userbase exactly why and how joking about this topic was harmful. We do have to take the history of the subculture into account – fanfic writers are used to being skeptical on this topic because “you’re hurting me” has been something said to us about merely writing about the presence of LGBT people in our works. There needed to be clarification. The perception here was that since WSFS requested this announcement be made, that the language of the statement came directly from them. And that language wasn’t specific to trademark, it didn’t state that there had been actions in the userbase that caused harm, and it didn’t provide anyone with a path forward.

    It’s very easy to take the statement that “we want to make sure users don’t mistakenly believe they’ve won a Hugo” as “we’ve seen you joking about winning a Hugo and we want you to cut it out.” Which comes across to us as telling us to stop having fun. You’re saying nobody did that, but that’s how the statement came off and that’s the perception. That is why the response was what it was. OTW has a long history of being bad at releasing communiques, and this is something we within the community know, and it’s become increasingly clear based on the discussion I’ve had here that this wasn’t the intent behind the statement. But there’s a lot of people involved in AO3 who don’t know 770 exists, and who won’t find this discussion, and will continue to mistakenly believe that the statement was people being mad about our silly “one one millionth of a Hugo” jokes.

    All those bazillions of AO3 members can read and comment at essentially the same time — they don’t have to do it singly in neat little rows of consecutive comments.

    This assumes that every person registered at AO3 saw the post when it was released. Personally, I didn’t even know about it or the discussion happening here until I was linked from an unrelated forum today. And since a lot of people aren’t going to read 350 comments before posting their own, you’re naturally going to get new people continuing to come in and have the same bad reaction to the perceived slight.

    And, correct or not, fic fandom is a contrary beast and our first response to being told “don’t do that,” especially by people outside our community, is to keep doing that but now even MORE, out of spite. I mean, LiveJournal and Fanfic.net telling us “stop doing that” was literally the reason AO3 was conceived and built! That culture has gotten a lot more overblown due to bad actors from within the house behaving extremely badly about what people choose to write. So in this case, it ran into a wall of militant contrariness that has become baked into AO3. I don’t always love that part of our culture either.

  17. “It’s very easy to take the statement that “we want to make sure users don’t mistakenly believe they’ve won a Hugo” as “we’ve seen you joking about winning a Hugo and we want you to cut it out.” Which comes across to us as telling us to stop having fun.”

    And to add to the cultural disconnect, the complaint about not being allowed to have fun sounds like the puppy slogans to me. I still have some “Wrongfans having wrong fun”-ribbons at home from MAC2.

  18. @Farasha —

    OTW has a long history of being bad at releasing communiques

    And yet AO3 commenters chose to blame Kevin and WSFS for an imperfect OTW release.

    Does that really sound fair to you?

    And, correct or not, fic fandom is a contrary beast and our first response to being told “don’t do that,” especially by people outside our community, is to keep doing that but now even MORE, out of spite. [….] So in this case, it ran into a wall of militant contrariness that has become baked into AO3.

    This is probably the most honest response I’ve seen so far.

    Does this type of behavior sound either mature or productive to you?

    note: I’ve gotta go feed ducks and chickens and do various other things. Any further responses will not occur for a while!

  19. @RedWombat:

    And if every person on AO3 took a consecutive day to think about their response, it would take 5479 years!
    And if each of them were laid end to end, assuming an average height of five feet, they would stretch 3048 kilometers! 1895 miles!
    If each of them took a single step, we would collectively travel 1806 kilometers! That’s 204 Everests!
    And if we stacked all the AO3 authors vertically, the ones on the bottom would die.

    This is why we need the Yertle the Turtle Protocols.

  20. We do have to take the history of the subculture into account – fanfic writers are used to being skeptical on this topic because “you’re hurting me” has been something said to us about merely writing about the presence of LGBT people in our works.

    This! This! And not just that. Like, wangst about how horrifically a ship is hurting you is a historically a huuuge crappy underbelly of the fandom! People threatened to kill themselves because the way other people portrayed Snape was at odds with their vision, or accused people of being OMG WORSE THAN HITLER because someone is gay. Or not gay. Or a top. Or a bottom. People declare dramatically from a soapbox that Anyone Who Ships This Couple Is A Rapist and furthermore they have been thrown into crushing despair just seeing the tag go by on Tumblr and that makes anyone who used that tag guilty of attempted manslaughter. Etc, etc, ad nauseam.

    Saying that nobody is taking somebody’s proclaimed anguish over Hugo jokes seriously and that makes them bad people Is—there’s no way to say this delicately—so absolutely bog standard for this sort of fandom wank that it honestly isn’t even gonna register for a lot of commenters.

  21. @Contrarius: “Does this type of behavior sound either mature or productive to you?”

    Why, yes. Yes, it does. It sounds exactly like how people used to being jacked around by the world keep that world from grinding them down and killing their spirits. Sounds mature to me. Kinda fannish, too.

    @Hampus Eckerman: “And to add to the cultural disconnect, the complaint about not being allowed to have fun sounds like the puppy slogans to me.”

    Well, yes. It also sounds like what people who are having their squee squashed by bluenoses say. It sounds like a lot of things, some of them very good things.

  22. This escalated quickly.

    Point of correction: Kevin Standlee didn’t use being published in a professional magazine as an argument from authority. He said he was published in the fanzine Drink Tank when it won a Hugo. A fanzine is as much a labor of love with a low barrier to entry as fanfic. Saying you wrote for a fanzine is not a claim of superiority over AO3 contributors.

  23. rcade, this is not a thing you personally can just arbitrarily rule on and say “I’m correcting you.” Some people in his audience very much took it as a claim of superiority, for all the reasons I already went through. Regardless of whether you think that was warranted, that’s how a number of people took it, because the culture of fanfic commenting is different than the culture of File770 commenting. Your understanding of fanzines is different, great! but you weren’t the target audience.

  24. John A Arkansawyer:

    “Well, yes. It also sounds like what people who are having their squee squashed by bluenoses say. It sounds like a lot of things, some of them very good things.”

    Lets have a day of finding new ways to interpret absolutely everything, so we can avoid acknowledge each others feelings! This will make wonders for respect and community.

  25. RedWombat: Saying that nobody is taking somebody’s proclaimed anguish over Hugo jokes seriously and that makes them bad people Is—there’s no way to say this delicately—so absolutely bog standard for this sort of fandom wank that it honestly isn’t even gonna register for a lot of commenters.

    I can absolutely understand that, while still feeling that it’s not an acceptable justification. Just because it’s okay in their minds to behave this way doesn’t mean that I have to accept it as okay in mine.

    This is like that guy whose work got slated onto the Nebula ballot, who then complained that it was SFWA’s fault for not telling him that cheating is not acceptable in U.S. culture.

    The AO3 members who have been (and still are) stepping on WSFS’ members toes are in someone else’s culture and community, demanding that they operate by AO3 norms.

  26. JJ:

    The AO3 members who have been (and still are) stepping on WSFS’ members toes are in someone else’s culture and community, demanding that they operate by AO3 norms.

    No. We’re WSFS members. Who are excited about participating in something that won an award. Who are in our own culture. In our own community. And operating by our own norms. You keep saying there’s these two huge different groups. You’re inventing a divide and then being unhappy that it exists.

  27. @Hampus Eckerman: “Lets have a day of finding new ways to interpret absolutely everything…”

    That’s not a bad idea in this case, though not for the reason you give:

    “…so we can avoid acknowledge each others feelings.”

    Let me put it this way: Unless you believe with good reason those comments come from pupvocateurs, saying their arguments are “like” other arguments is not helpful. If you give me an arbitrary X and Y, I will explain to why X is like Y. If you give me enough time, I will go on to explain why Y is not like X. Things being like each other is not saying much.

    So yes, I think finding a new way to interpret arguments which seem “like” other arguments is a very good idea, so we can respect each other’s feelings.

  28. @JJ:

    The AO3 members who have been (and still are) stepping on WSFS’ members toes are in someone else’s culture and community, demanding that they operate by AO3 norms.

    Where have AO3 fans gone into the WSFS’ community? All the links posted here have shown the joking around happening on AO3 and private individuals’ twitter accounts.

  29. John A Arkansawyer:

    “Let me put it this way: Unless you believe with good reason those comments come from pupvocateurs, saying their arguments are “like” other arguments is not helpful. “

    If people argue like puppies and want to burn down the Hugo’s like puppies, I think there’s good reasons to compare them with puppies. I mostly hope they won’t manage to cause even more damage.

  30. MRM: Where have AO3 fans gone into the WSFS’ community? All the links posted here have shown the joking around happening on AO3 and private individuals’ twitter accounts.

    Someone who is publicly declaring themselves a Hugo Award Winner when they are not one is putting themselves in WSFS’ community and culture. And then demanding that WSFS members be perfectly fine with that “joking”, because it’s perfectly fine in AO3 culture.

  31. Muccamukk: No. We’re WSFS members. Who are excited about participating in something that won an award. Who are in our own culture. In our own community. And operating by our own norms.

    Well, it’s even worse, then, isn’t it, when people who are part of the WSFS community think that it’s acceptable to completely disregard consideration for other WSFS’ members feelings.

  32. @JJ:

    The AO3 members who have been (and still are) stepping on WSFS’ members toes are in someone else’s culture and community, demanding that they operate by AO3 norms.

    Where have AO3 fans gone into the WSFS’ community? All the links posted here have shown the joking around happening on AO3 and private individuals’ twitter accounts.

    Unless you consider being nominated for a Hugo Award and then winning that award ‘going into the WSFS community,’ this argument makes zero sense. And, in fact, the situation is the exact opposite: Ao3 didn’t ‘go into’ the WSFS and attempt to enforce any cultural or community norms, the WSFS started making demands of Ao3’s culture and community and doing so in the most tone deaf and high-handed manner possible, with the absolutely predictable response even if you know nothing about the ongoing intra-cultural struggles inside transformative fandom itself.

    And, speaking of which: the allegation has been made, by Kevin Standlee, that every single work on Ao3 is eligible for Hugo nomination in the appropriate category length. A cursory review of past Hugo winners yielded the information that, in 2004, Neil Gaiman won the Best Short Story Hugo for A Study In Emerald, which was a Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraftiana fanfic pastiche riffing on A Study In Scarlet, a pretty well-known one to those of us who incorporate cosmic horror themes in our fanfic. Nothing else, however, leaps out as being clearly transformative in nature.

    So my question is: excepting Gaiman’s work in 2004, when was the last time a transformative piece of fiction was nominated for a Hugo and what were the results of that nomination?

  33. @Hampus Eckerman: “If people argue like puppies and want to burn down the Hugo’s like puppies, I think there’s good reasons to compare them with puppies.”

    I’d recommend making that specific complaint about the people who made that remark rather than the vaguer one. I think. I’m still not sure it’s a good comparison. The worst of the pups had a pre-existing hostility which I don’t think these folks have. But it’s narrow enough not to encourage people not making that statement to think you mean them.

  34. Some people in his audience very much took it as a claim of superiority, for all the reasons I already went through.

    And I’m trying to correct that perception because I think they are wrong. He mentioned his writing for Drink Tank to say “I contributed to a Hugo-winning project but I don’t call myself a Hugo winner.” No one should have taken that as an effort to pull rank.

  35. @JJ:

    Someone who is publicly declaring themselves a Hugo Award Winner when they are not one is putting themselves in WSFS’ community and culture. And then demanding that WSFS members be perfectly fine with that “joking”, because it’s perfectly fine in AO3 culture.

    By that logic, anyone posting fanfic anywhere on the internet should automatically remove it if the author of the original canon thinks that fanfic is a bad thing.

    The entirety of the public internet cannot be claimed as belonging to the WSFS community or culture. Trademark should be defended where there is a legal reason to do so, of course. But if you’re seeking out any random public post of person who mentions the Hugos — that is you entering their community. Like, if some strangers were joking around with their friends on a public street and one said, “I won a Hugo!”, would you walk up to them and demand that they not make such jokes and treat the Hugos according to your own customs and preferences? Of course not. Or at least I hope you wouldn’t. Because that would be insane.

    Now, if they set up a booth and were hawking their books as being written by Hugo Award Winning Author, then that would be an entirely different matter. But that’s not what is happening, here (that Etsy thing aside).

  36. MRM: The entirety of the public internet cannot be claimed as belonging to the WSFS community or culture.

    The Hugo Awards are not in the Public Domain. Someone who falsely claims to be a Hugo Award winner is putting themselves into the WSFS culture and community’s domain.

    Having a bunch of “Hugo Award Winning Author” posts pop up in my Twitter feed, hashes, and saved searches is not “seeking out” anything.

    You know, if the AO3 members had limited their “I’m a Hugo Award Winner” joking to AO3 or private forums, I wouldn’t have cared. But Twitter is in no sense a private forum.

  37. @JJ:

    The Hugo Awards are not in the Public Domain.

    As before, I think it’s important to separate out what is a legal matter from what is not. It is no good to confuse community or culture with ‘Public Domain’. If somebody is seriously claiming to be a Hugo Award Winner in a manner that could be construed as damaging to the WSFS’ mark, then the WSFS should contact that person directly. That is a legal matter and it should be treated seriously as such.

    But if it’s not deemed such a legal matter, then it’s just a joke about the Hugos, in as much as a random joke Batman account is a joke about… well, Batman, presumably. It’s as fair play as any other joke about the Hugos.

    And if it’s just a joke or discussion, and it is between private individuals who are not approaching WSFS members, not inviting WSFS members to their conversations, and not using WSFS servers or sites for those conversations, then it remains within their own community. Just because somebody discusses or jokes about something relating to you does not mean that their space becomes your space.

  38. MRM: And if it’s just a joke or discussion, and it is between private individuals who are not approaching WSFS members, not inviting WSFS members to their conversations, and not using WSFS servers or sites for those conversations, then it remains within their own community.

    The fact that jokes are not necessarily identifiable as such has already been discussed, as has the fact that being smacked in the face with disrespect for the Hugo Awards whenever I happen to log onto Twitter is public, not private.

  39. No one should have taken that as an effort to pull rank.

    And no one should have taken “I’m a Hugo winner now!” as anything but a joke. And no one should have decided those jokes were shitting on the award. And no one should have done this or that or the other thing, but guess what? We don’t get to tell people how they SHOULD have taken things. They take them as they take them.

    I’ve tried twice now to explain WHY that particular bit went over like a lead manatee, but if you’re not willing to meet me halfway and admit that it’s possible there was a context that colored the reception for that particular audience, I am not gonna keep yelling into the void.

  40. “And if it’s just a joke or discussion, and it is between private individuals who are not approaching WSFS members, not inviting WSFS members to their conversations, and not using WSFS servers or sites for those conversations, then it remains within their own community.”

    This is in no way true when it comes to public social media. That is not how it works. When you make your in-house jokes on public media, it is outside of your own culture (and of course outside WSFS culture too). You are making claims to the public and if they aren’t aware of the in-house culture, they will be seen as serious claims. Regardless if they were apparent jokes for those in the culture or not. Regardless of legality.

    If you use that pattern of speech in large amounts on public media, you are diluting the trademarks value. Regardless of it is legal or not.

    Commercial piracy is the worst. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the “joking” is harmless.

  41. Can anyone explain how AO3 got two million user account signups? That’s a staggeringly huge number which is likely larger than the registered usership of many enormous media companies whose works inspire fanfic. It may be one of the largest open source projects on the net in terms of total user count.

    What are the big reasons that compel people to go to the trouble of setting up an account instead of reading it as a lurker?

  42. I did put “joking” inside quotation marks, because I don’t really feel the word fits entirely. Some people are absolutely joking. Others seem to use it as some kind of revenge to harm those who didn’t like the jokes. Even others reason very seriously why it is not a joke at all.

    It is a mix.

  43. Nagaina: So my question is: excepting Gaiman’s work in 2004, when was the last time a transformative piece of fiction was nominated for a Hugo and what were the results of that nomination?

    I suggest that you ask Kevin Standlee, since he’s the one you are quoting. He might or might not know the answer to that. But the Hugo Awards finalists for every year are on the internet, so you can go look for yourself if you wish.

  44. @rcade:

    There’s a setting to make fics only visible if you’re logged in, called archive-locking. A lot of people archive-lock their adult fic. So if you want to read adult fic (which is what a lot of people want out of AO3), you probably want an account. It also lets you bookmark and subscribe, but mostly it lets you read archive-locked fic.

  45. rcade: What are the big reasons that compel people to go to the trouble of setting up an account instead of reading it as a lurker?

    AO3 has a really nice system of being able to bookmark and favorite specific works and categories / tags, so if you sign up for an account you can save those things and not have to search anew every time you go there.

  46. Nagaina: The first one that leaps to mind is “Redshirts” by John Scalzi which won the Hugo in 2013 (Scalzi also wrote “Fuzzy Nation” which is transformative).

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