Pixel Scroll 6/12/17 Avoid The Green Pixels, They’re Not Ripe Yet

(1) READING SERIES CROWDFUNDING. Less than two days to go in the Fantastic Fiction Kickstarter at KGB and Matthew Kressel says they’re still about $1500 shy of what they need to run for six years.

Here are a few of the clever Facebook appeals made by the Kindling Kris Dikeman to encourage people to squeeze out a few more bucks for the series.

  • Sick of how things are going? Hoping the singularity hits soon? You can make things better right now by supporting the Fantastic Fiction Reading Series Kickstarter. The Fantastic Fiction series helps writers promote their work and creates a community for genre artists. Pay tribute to our future robot overlords and receive cool stuff at http://kck.st/2rq5KFA
  • Has the state of our world got you wishing the zombie apocalypse would just start already? You can make the world a better place without the rotting undead’s help by supporting the Fantastic Fiction Reading Series Kickstarter. The Fantastic Fiction series helps writers promote their work and creates a community for genre artists. Plus, you’re going to need stuff to read while you’re cowering in the dark. Check it out: http://kck.st/2rq5KFA
  • Considering a move to the Shire to escape the current state of the world? Put down that second breakfast and shuffle your hairy little feet on over to the Fantastic Fiction Reading Series Kickstarter. The Fantastic Fiction reading series helps writers promote their work and creates a community for genre artists. Galadriel sez: do it for me, hafling: http://kck.st/2rq5KFA

(2) DISAPPOINTMENT. Mari Ness sent a series of tweets discussing why she isn’t on Worldcon 75 programming.

(3) WILD CARDS. In “Something Old, Something New…” George R.R. Martin refutes an old complaint, then explains why readers will have no grounds for it in the Wild Cards book coming out tomorrow.

I’ve had some readers complain about my name being featured on the covers of the Wild Cards books because I “didn’t write them.” That’s a bullshit complaint, IMSHO. No, I am not the sole author of the Wild Cards stories, I am only one of… ah, lemme see, I believe it was forty-one writers at last count.

I am, however, the editor of every single one of the twenty-three volumes published to date, and the new ones in the pipeline as well… the guy who recruits all those writers, determines the ‘overplots’ of the triads, solicits proposals, accepts and rejects, and gives extensive notes on rewrites. (And there’s a LOT of rewriting in Wild Cards, to make all the bits fit together so the whole will be more than the sum of its parts). It’s a lot more work than any other sort of anthology, believe me… though I love it, so I don’t complain… too much. I earn those credits, and to suggest that my name is just being ‘slapped on’ the covers while someone else does the work is as ignorant as it is offensive.

(4) BIRD IS THE WORD. At Tor.com, Aidan Moher makes Yoon Ha Lee’s Raven Stratagem sound irresistible.

Unlike its predecessor, Raven Stratagem requires no warming up period. Very little of the narrative in Raven Stratagem is bogged-down by incomprehensible infodumps about “calendrical rot.” In comparison, it feels open and airy. Through Cheris and Jedao, Lee proved his ability to create complex and interesting characters, and this time around he throws the doors open by introducing several new point-of-view characters, all of whom are engaging in their own way. From the crashhawk Brezan, who’s on a mission to take Jedao down, to General Kel Khiruev, who is reluctantly beholden to the undead general after he commandeers her swarm, to Shuos Mikodez, leader of a faction of assassins, each of the major players has their own well-defined and compelling part to play in Raven Stratagem’s overall narrative. They’re all damaged and dangerous, full of regrets, but they are also vulnerable and likeable in a way that allows readers to connect with them on the right emotional level.

(5) FOOLPROOF WISDOM. Timothy the Talking Cat continues to dispense advice to writers in “More Mentoring from Tim” on Camestros Felapton’s site. It’s all one graphic, so we’ll have to do without an excerpt. But I’m sure knowing Timothy’s track record you have already clicked through before reaching the end of this paragraph.

(6) AUSTIN OBIT. UK comics fan Alan Austin died May 9.

Alan Austin, pioneer of UK comics fandom and a long-time friend of 30th Century Comics, passed away yesterday morning after a long struggle with cancer.

Beginning in the 1970’s, Alan published the long-running fanzine Fantasy Unlimited (later Comics Unlimited), which drew together comics enthusiasts from all over the UK, and indeed, all over the world. He also published Whiz Kids, Golden Age Fanzine, and the Marvel Super-Hero Index, as well as being a co-publisher of the very first Comics Price Guide for Great Britain. For many years, he ran the shop Heroes, in Islington, London, and in later years was a regular feature at UK comic marts.

Neil Gaiman purchased his first Spirit comic book from Austin’s shop in 1975.

(7) VERDUGO OBIT. Actress Elena Verdugo died May 30. Her radio, movie and TV career spanned six decades. Although she was best known for her TV role in Marcus Welby, M.D., her genre work included horror movies like The Frozen Ghost (1945). Here’s an excerpt from her New York Times obituary,

… Because she had a Hispanic surname, Hollywood mostly typecast her in horror movies and comedies as Gypsy girls, Indian maidens, Mexican peasants, harem handmaidens and South Sea islanders. “With that name, they don’t call you up to do little American parts,” she was quoted as saying in “Women in Horror Films, 1940s” (1999) by Gregory William Mank. “They think you’re a black-eyed, dark-haired señorita” and I’m blond. So I put on my wig and tried to live up to what they thought ‘Spanish’ to be or ‘Gypsy,’ or ‘native,’ or something.”

She later played opposite Lon Chaney Jr. and Boris Karloff in Universal’s “House of Frankenstein” (1944), in which a trio of movie monsters collaborate against their makers’ enemies, and in “The Frozen Ghost” (1945), also opposite Chaney.

(8) TODAY’S DAY

Superman Day

What’s that?! There in the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It’s the Man of Tomorrow! Superman has gone by many names over the years, but one thing has remained the same. He has always stood for what’s best about humanity, all of our potential for terrible destructive acts, but also our choice to not act on the level of destruction we could wreak. Superman was first created in 1933 by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the writer and artist respectively. His first appearance was in Action Comics #1, and that was the beginning of a long and illustrious career for the Man of Steel. In his unmistakable blue suit with red cape, and the stylized red S on his chest, the figure of Superman has become one of the most recognizable in the world.

Mark Seifert at Bleeding Cool News has more:

In 2013, DC Entertainment declared June 12 as Man of Steel day “in celebration of the summer’s most eagerly anticipated film”. The date seems to have stuck, with a name change to “Superman Day” because I’ve seen a whole lot of #supermanday hashtags in my twitter feed this morning. I know that Metropolis, IL just held their Superman Celebration over the past 4 days€¦

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • June 12, 1968 Rosemary’s Baby first seen this day.
  • June 12, 1987 Predator first played to audiences.
  • June 12, 2015 Jurassic World debuted.

(10) PAST TENSE. ComicsBeat tees up an unusual WW2-era critique, “Bennett and Savuage take on Japanese Internment in new BOMBSHELLS UNITED series”.

It was important to Bennett to make her takes on DC’s greatest heroines less inherently perfect and to provide them with the opportunity for improvement and redemption. “I’m very into fallible heroines,” Bennett explained. “I understand why so many inspirational characters are given to girls, whether it’s to make up for the years that their weren’t any or that there were so many damsels in distress, but there’s a degree at which when we only give children– but little girls especially– aspirational heroines, we’re denying them the ability to screw up. To have a complete human experience. Being a child and seeing these role models, I knew that I could never possibly compete or live up, so when I screwed up it was horrible. These characters weren’t afforded the opportunity to fail and come back from it.”

Indeed, the first arc of Bombshells United is all about failure– in particular, America’s failure to protect the rights of up to 120,000 Japanese Americans when the national government imprisoned them in internment camps for the duration of World War II. In Bennett’s exploration of Japanese American internment, she casts Cassie Sandsmark and Donna Troy, two characters who have carried the Wonder Girl moniker, as second generation Japanese Americans whose friends and family are being held against their will. While Cassie and Donna are not Japanese in the mainstream DC Universe, according to Bennett, these are her universe’s “definitive versions” of the characters.

(11) POSTSCRIPT. Abigail Nussbaum has more to say — “Five (Additional) Comments on Wonder Woman”.

My problem, however, with talking about Wonder Woman as a feminist work is that most of that feminism is external to the film. That is, Wonder Woman is feminist because of what it is, not because of what it does. To be clear, I absolutely agree with the statement that being the first movie about a female superhero in the current, mega-successful iteration of superhero movies (and one of only a small number before that) is a feminist act in its own right. But there’s only so much that you can say about that, and that’s a problem that is exacerbated by Wonder Woman herself. More than almost any other character in pop culture, Diana exists outside of patriarchy. And while it’s powerful to see a woman who brushes aside the assumption that she’s not as good as a man because the very idea that this might be true is completely foreign to her heritage and upbringing, what this also means is that a lot of the central questions of feminism are equally foreign to her. I’m not as down on Wonder Woman as Jill Lepore, writing in The New Yorker, but she’s not wrong when she says that “Gadot’s Wonder Woman doesn’t fight for rights because she transcends that fight; she is unfettered by it and insensible to it, an implausible post-feminist hero.” Diana’s journey over the course of the movie involves learning to see humanity–or, as she puts it, “men”–for what it is, with all its strengths and flaws. But left completely unacknowledged is the degree to which the cruelty of men is often visited upon women. How does Diana’s bemusement at the concept of marriage face up to the discovery that almost all of the people she meets in 1918 would consider it acceptable for a man to beat his wife? How does her decision to engage in heterosexual intercourse change in light of the fact that she is moving through a rape culture? How does her joy at seeing a baby withstand the knowledge that most women in that period have no choice in when or whether to have children, and that many of them die in childbirth?

(12) WONDER WHY. Meanwhile, Stephanie Abraham clearly feels there’s no pop culture victory that can’t be pictured as a defeat with a little effort — “When Will Wonder Woman Be a Fat, Femme Woman of Color?”

Why couldn’t Wonder Woman be a woman of color? When it was announced that Gadot would play Wonder Woman, audiences went wild body shaming her for not having large enough breasts. One can only imagine the white supremacy that would have emerged had the announcement said instead that she would be played by a Black woman. On Paradise Island, there are Black warriors in addition to white ones, which is a good start, but other women of color are missing. Also, while the female warriors are strong and ass-kicking, they all have tall, thin body types and they all could be models on a runway. In fact, in a pivotal battle scene, Wonder Woman struts across the battlefield as if on a catwalk. As a result, their physical strength plays second fiddle to their beauty, upholding the notion that in order to access power women must be beautiful in a traditional way. Especially with the body positivity movement gaining steam, the film could have spotlighted female warriors with fat, thick and short body types. While people have said that warriors can’t be fat, some of our best paid male athletes are, particularly linebackers on the football field, and no one doubts their physical strength.

Another problem is that the story’s overt queerness gets sublimated by heteronormativity. Diana comes from a separatist commune of women who have intentionally chosen to live without men. In one of the first scenes between Diana and Steve, she explains that she read 12 volumes of a series on sex that concluded that while men are required for reproduction, when it comes to female pleasure, they’re unnecessary. While a love story develops between them, a requirement in superhero stories, Diana thankfully doesn’t compromise her integrity for him.

(13) GENRE MOVIE POSTERS. Bill recommends Posteritati

Hundreds of SF movie posters: https://posteritati.com/genre/sci-fi?page=1

Hundreds more Fantasy movie posters: https://posteritati.com/genre/fantasy?page=1

Note: click “In Stock Only” to “off” to maximize browsing.

(14) BIONIC HANDS. Click on “3D printed bionic hands trial begins in Bristol” to see the video report.

The world’s first clinical trial of 3D printed bionic hands for child amputees starts this week in Bristol.

They are made by a South Gloucestershire company which only launched four years ago.

If the trial is successful the hands will become available on the NHS, bringing life-changing improvements for patients.

(15) PROSPECTIVE ASTRONAUTS. NPR’s story “Meet Your Lucky Stars: NASA Announces A New Class Of Astronaut Candidates” comes with pictures and short interviews.

Jasmin Moghbeli, one of the dozen candidates, spoke with NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro from Houston’s Johnson Space Center, where she’ll undertake the training program starting in August.

Moghbeli, who says she’s wanted to be an astronaut since the sixth grade, talked about what kind of candidate it takes to earn the coveted spot.

“Start looking into science, technology, engineering, math, those kinds of fields,” the German-born, New York native says. But whatever you do, she says, love it.

“There were many other applicants that applied who were extremely qualified for this position that aren’t lucky enough to be sitting up here like I am,” she adds. “So make sure you’re doing what you love. If I did not get the call saying, ‘Hey can you join us here at NASA?’ I still would’ve been extremely happy in the career that I was in.”

The seven men and five women of the class bring an impressive resume to NASA: The astronaut candidates are an athletic crew and include former SpaceX employees, a marine biologist and half of them are military officers.

(16) CAPED CLAPTRAP. Glen Weldon claims “Adam West Saved Batman. And Me.” If only by reaction — the author argues that the show was so silly it revived interest in the One True Dark Knight.

In my book, The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, I attempt to unpack how the show, and West’s performance in particular, are the reason anyone’s talking about the character of Batman today.

Batman comics had languished near the bottom of the sales charts — the publisher even made (likely disingenuous) threats to cancel them outright — before West took the hero into the mainstream. The mainstream embraced him, and — after a brief Batmania fad gripped the country in 1966 — swiftly tired of all things Bat. Batman comics sales plummeted again.

Comics creators and fans resented the clownish version of their hero who’d spent time in the cultural spotlight, and reacted against it by engineering a version of the character who was — specifically and intentionally — everything West’s Batman wasn’t: dark, haunted, gothic, brooding. Obsessed.

A new generation of comics readers — who knew a little something about obsession — saw themselves in this new, grim, self-serious Batman. For better or worse, he’s been DC Comics’ top-selling hero ever since.

(17) NOT FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON. Whenever Larry Correia blows his stack at me, once he finally runs out of obscene things to say, which takes awhile, the next thing he does (like today) is tell people I keep linking to his blog to get pingbacks that will lure traffic from his popular site. Which is not only a lie – I link whenever I have an interest in an item – but is absurd on its face. Below are the Alexa rankings for our two sites. And the fact is that although Correia has repeated this claim several times since 2014, at no time then or now was his site ranked above mine, or anywhere close to it.

(Bear in mind that 1 would be the highest ranking, so the site with the most traffic has the lower rank numbers.)

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Andrew Porter, Bill, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

130 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/12/17 Avoid The Green Pixels, They’re Not Ripe Yet

  1. Apparently I am incapable of contacting Charon without Filer assistance/introductions, but once again we have succeeded.

    @Aaron: Yeah, the Pups decide who should be on “their side” without bothering to find out, and if the person (like Scalzi or OGH) isn’t, it’s a terrible betrayal and the betrayers should not be allowed to even link to their public posts.

    @Bruce A: I don’t know if Font of All Evil Tom Doherty still has a piece of Baen Books, but the paper books are distributed through Simon and Schuster. Now if S&S doesn’t count as Big Tradpub, I don’t know what does.

  2. Lee:

    One good thing to come out of it for me personally is that I became much more involved in reading new releases, nominating, and voting for the Hugos.

    That’s true for me too. Somewhat ironically, the kerpupple have made me (more) aware of a lot of great recent SF – but not the sort peddled by the puppies themselves.

  3. I work in my day with several Baen readers, one of whom is the sort of person I think the pups think is their Silent Majority. He and I talk a lot. He’s still reading books by the pups but can’t read their blogs or Facebook pages any more. I think several of them have done their careers some long-term damage, not by being conservatives, but by being jerks.

  4. Shut my office door and read Raven Strategem all afternoon, or keep my door open and do actual work?

    You didn’t consider altering the calendar so it’s a public holiday?

  5. Thomas Covenant: Which trilogy is it where he rapes someone? A truly rotten “hero”.

    I’m pretty sure that’s right in the beginning of the very first book.

    Much farther in than that – more of a third to a half. Back in the days of Usenet, whenever the books came up, someone would mention it. I was always amazed that they made it that far – I was done with His Whinyness long before that point.

  6. @Kendall —

    One good thing (to me; maybe not to anyone else) from the Kerpupple is that I started reading File 770. ?

    So much this. I had never voted in the Hugos til the pups piqued my interest, and now I make huge time (and financial) commitments every year to read the biggest hopefuls and then the nominees. And though I still don’t read blogs on a regular basis, 770 has become a staple for me. We should really give the Canine Corps some sort of award for boosting Hugo and general sff interest and participation.

  7. Contrarius: We should really give the Canine Corps some sort of award for boosting Hugo and general sff interest and participation.

    Yeah, nah.

    I love where I live now, and I probably wouldn’t be living here if I had never been with my ex — so I’m calling the time I spent in our relationship a “win”. But given the years of verbal and emotional abuse I put up with, I won’t be sending my ex a thank-you note — and I won’t be sending the Puppies a thank-you note, either.

    Horrible, abusive people do not deserve awards simply because the people they abuse manage to find a way to come out ahead after the abuse.

  8. @JJ —

    Horrible, abusive people do not deserve awards simply because the people they abuse manage to find a way to come out ahead after the abuse.

    True — but in this case the bonus is that the pups would hate getting the award, since most of the increased interest and participation has been in direct opposition to their goals. 😉

  9. Johan P – That is my experience as well, mostly it made me aware of a lot more new releases and where to find that information.

  10. Lee, in the case of my story, I was a broke teenager volunteering in the Green Room to pay for my badge at the Worldcon in Chicago in 1982. (So was my sister; she was there and got much the same treatment from the same Big Name Author.) I was so broke I didn’t have a hotel room; I spent at least one night sleeping in the film room…

    Said author literally backed me, and (I think) my sister, into a corner complaining about How Badly He Was Being Treated by the convention in such matters as not allowing him to carry a large bag through the Art Show. He had other complaints, but they are now mercifully lost to the mists of time. He was talking loudly and intimidated the hell out of me. (I did later find out that he probably was hearing impaired, which may explain the volume but not the intimidation.) If memory serves, and I haven’t heard my sister’s story for years so I may be misremembering, that same Big Name Author told her on a different occasion that he was carrying (or possibly had in his hotel room; as I said, memory blurs) a gun.

    You might consider him a Proto-Puppy.

    Exactly what he thought yelling at a teenaged girl would do to resolve his real or imagined difficulties with how the convention was run escapes me. I was obviously a gopher with no power or authority whatsoever.

    It’s been thirty-five years now, and I have not bought a book by that Big Name Author since. I used to read him regularly. He’s published a lot of books since then, too.

    On the other hand, I’ll always have fond memories of Larry Niven; he helped me carry donuts when I went on a donut run. He was a nice guy who treated the volunteers well.

    Cassy

  11. Somewhere in my various online activities (read a word, leave a word, repeat) I responded to someone who wondered how a writer could ever keep continuity straight in the days before the internet by speculating that by the time it started to matter to writers, there were fans who knew it all, and learning who these fans were (I didn’t go into as much detail, so maybe it was Twitter) was as easy as looking at the letters pages. For that matter, fans have been working their way into prodom since forever anyway.

    At any rate, fans are the answer, just like they were in GALAXY QUEST.

    eta: The SNL Trek video doesn’t show in my country either. I’m in the “United States.”

  12. Kip W:

    At any rate, fans are the answer, just like they were in GALAXY QUEST.

    It seems so. Recently, I was reading one of Brust’s Dragaera novels and at one point, he credited several fan sites for helping him keep everything in order.

  13. @Lee: punctuation correction:

    Do people complain about Martin Greenberg’s name on all those anthologies he “edited”?

    Hartwell once observed that MG simply took the first X0,000 words of vaguely–topic-matching stories that came over the transom.

    @Kendall: I wonder what the producers did to make McGuire slow down enough to be a plausible narrator. I noticed when she was Boskone GoH that she talks incredibly fast: clearly, to the point, without er’s and um’s, but if you ear-blinked you’d miss something, which is not good for material that may be listened to in a noisy environment. I’m not a good reader because I try to stretch phrases and breaths (I’ve been studying Gaiman’s reading to teach better balance), but I don’t read aloud nearly as fast as McGuire spoke extempore.

    @lurkertype: you expect the Puppies to know who (or what) distributes their pet publisher? That would require them to pay attention and think, instead of just ranting; AFAICT the only time they look under the surface is to find imaginary conspiracies.

    @Cassy B: I could make an obvious guess about your BNA**hole (helped by the note that he’s published a lot since — my first guess would have been someone long gone), but it doesn’t much matter; some people just believe the universe revolves around them (or if it doesn’t, somebody is messing with it), and the only thing to do with them is avoid them.

  14. Rob Thornton
    And after I posted, I remembered a Niven timeline Tim Kyger put together, and thought of what a help that could have been for Niven, who published it in one of his books.

  15. @James Moar: I dare not alter the calendar lest I find Vidona inquisitors at my door.

  16. JJ,

    When I read your comment, I started singing this classic country song by Patty Loveless about finding true love after your heart has been broken:
    “Hurt Me Bad (in a Real Good Way)”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3VUHI5jEy4

    Chip,

    Most people don’t read well because of insufficient breath control. One of the greatest tips that I had was to practice breath control by sitting in a straight back chair (like traditional dining room furniture). Then sit up straight while holding the bottom of the chair (or sit on your hands if reaching is a problem). The point is to make sure that you can’t hunch your shoulders. Good posture is helpful for good breathing. Take the biggest breath you can and recite the alphabet slowly with control. After a while, you will be able to read more clearly by pausing in the correct places, instead of just where you run out of air. This is helpful for reading aloud very long sentences. If you have a chance to rehearse the text, then mark with pencil the places where you are going to pause to breath, single slash for short breath, double slash for long breath. You can also underline words that you want to emphasize. Of course, variation in pacing is helpful to keep the reader’s interest, but it is really hard to vary pacing appropriately if you are rushing to get to the end of the sentence before you run out of breath.

  17. The most impressive breath control I ever saw was from an out-of-shape local cartoonist at the Dallas Fantasy Fair in ’84. I came out of the film room to tell Robert Crumb that they were showing Betty Boop, and this guy was talking to him. He was already in a sentence, but he knew that if he stopped talking, I might say a word to his idol, and he went on for what felt like another five solid minutes without employing a comma or period. I went back to the cartoons, though in retrospect, it might have been more entertaining to watch him.

  18. @Rob Thornton:

    Kip W:

    At any rate, fans are the answer, just like they were in GALAXY QUEST.

    It seems so. Recently, I was reading one of Brust’s Dragaera novels and at one point, he credited several fan sites for helping him keep everything in order.

    And the folks at Mainframe Entertainment actively credited some Transformers fans for helping them keep things consistent while they were doing Beast Wars. (There’s a mention of this on the tvtropes page under ‘Shout Out’, particularly to them using Benson Yee, aka ‘Wonko the Sane’, as a continuity consultant.)

  19. Kip W: The SNL Trek video doesn’t show in my country either. I’m in the “United States.”

    Ah, my apologies. I may have my computer set up in a way that, er, prevents that issue. 😉

  20. Hey Glyer, I’d figure I’d drop by to make sure that you got some non-chinese traffic.

  21. @ravenshrike

    I award you no points, and may Bog have mercy on your soul.

  22. World Weary on June 14, 2017 at 2:00 pm said:
    I spent junior high in band, playing a woodwind. Some of the music came with breathing marks – they look like commas, set above the staff – and we learned to breath when we could, in addition.
    My English teachers spent a little time trying to teach us stuff like that, too: how to use punctuation in reading out loud, even if we didn’t have to do it much.

  23. Kip W, maybe your random fan played an instrument like PJ Evans! One of the readers at church is a professional trumpet player so breath control is not a problem for him.

  24. I finished Raven Stratagem on Wednesday after my one-hour layover in Chicago on Tuesday evening turned into a Epic Tale of Cancelled and Delayed Flights in which I ended up delayed by a total of 23 hours.

    Overall, I quite enjoyed the book, but it started poorly and there were a few rough patches of “Tell not show” scattered throughout, most of which were infodumps.

    There are a few twists and surprises – most of which are telegraphed enough that they’re not completely outta left field.

    It wasn’t as good as its predecessor, but is still very much worth the read.

  25. @Charon – Wow, that is a huge and adorable kitty! (as seen on your FB profile, posted a page or so back)

    (17) I will never understand the Sad Puppies and their Puppy ways. Rabid Puppies, I totally get – they are fleafully* jerkish and enjoy destroying things, particularly when those things are enjoyed by some people who are not far right and/or nihilistic trolls – but reading the comments on LC’s blog, I see him, Mauzer, Freer, and various other long-time Puppies making seemingly honest (in their head canon) claims about OGH lying about what they’ve said. Having followed the kerpupple closely from year 2, I have read many more of their actual words than any sane person should, and the closest I recall OGH coming to “lying” is when he makes a short summary of their words, with a link provided to those words. Maybe they are conflating snark and dishonesty?

    Now that I think about it, there’s the whole SP != RP thing, but that’s a lie the SP tell themselves and justifiably doesn’t get any traction outside their own safe spaces.

    *Typo’d gleefully as fleefully, then decided I like fleafully better than either.

  26. kathodus: reading the comments on LC’s blog, I see him, Mauzer, Freer, and various other long-time Puppies making seemingly honest (in their head canon) claims about OGH lying about what they’ve said. Having followed the kerpupple closely from year 2, I have read many more of their actual words than any sane person should, and the closest I recall OGH coming to “lying” is when he makes a short summary of their words, with a link provided to those words. Maybe they are conflating snark and dishonesty?

    That’s what is so hilarious. They claim that Mike slices-and-dices their words to make them into something other than what they’ve actually said. But he doesn’t. He generally quotes two or three sequential paragraphs, or one large paragraph — and the words are really what those people said.

    The reality is that they don’t like Mike quoting verbatim words they’ve said, which they didn’t expect anyone outside their little echo chamber to see — words which invariably show them for who and what they really are.

  27. The truth hurts, especially when it’s what you said yourself. Real life is a bit harder to retcon if you don’t have enough power to change the calendar alter the Wayback Machine.

    @Cassy B: I have a real good guess who your BNA-hole was, and I’ll bet I’m guessing the same person as Chip is. Gosh, I was at that con (and OGH was editing the newszine “The Daley Planet”), too bad we didn’t meet then. I would have let you sleep on our floor and use the shower.

  28. Lurkertype, that’s very sweet; thanks!

    Since he’s still alive, I don’t feel I should name the BNA. And I’m not sure who Chip (or you!) are guessing. But “proto-puppy” is a fairly apt description, I think, for a number of reasons.

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