As Doctor Science Suggested.
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Mike Glyer's news of science fiction fandom
As Doctor Science Suggested.
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Apropos of the Dragons, does anyone know the gap they have between end of voting and award?
I have not done this, but it would have been trivially easy to register under at least five different email addresses, and presuming I was otherwise honest about the registration information I would expect the unknown admins would want to negate all my votes, which might not be an especially quick process.
It would have been pretty easy to register one of them under the name Vox Day… Not done that either.
Re the Dragons, I tend to think some set of Puppies are the anonymous admins behind the award. Everything from the categories chosen to the lax security around voting to the indifferent efforts to promote the award and shepherd people through the process might as well have been designed to hijack the name of a large brand for narrow purposes. If that’s the case, everything that looks slapdash about the process is functional.
@NickPheas: Based on my half-assed research, voting would seem to close at 11:59 1st of September, which gives them a maximum of ~4 days to tally it, make any changes the secret cabal administering the awards deem necessary and announce before Dragon Con finishes on the 5th of September. I could find no concrete information on when they would announce the awards, beyond “at DragonCon”.
The awards will be announced at an undisclosed location, where a man wearing a velvet mask will whisper the results into an iPhone, possibly set to “Record,” which will be summarily dropped into a well and buried in dirt.
The mound of dirt will then be livestreamed on Ustream.TV. We apologize for those of you who find the broadcast interrupted by advertisements.
Bartimaeus, thank you!
Jim, I do appreciate the time you took to write up your last post – it’s just not where I am in thinking this one through.
Maybe they’re still checking all the Dragon Award voters against Tron Guy’s Circle of Trust.
Presumably we can then count on that iPhone being eagerly dug up by Declan Finn.
Because his honor is at stake!
(Copied from other thread where it doesn’t belong):
Re 3SV again (sorry): It has just struck me that Jameson’s proposal actually said that one of the aims of downvoting was to vote off things that would not have reached the longlist without a slate. That’s quite different from ‘would not (hypothetically) have reached the shortlist without a slate’. A work that would not have reached the top fifteen without a slate isn’t a ‘kingmaker’ nominee; it’s probably a Castalia House product, or equivalent. So voting a work of that nature down would be a lot easier; but on the other hand this confirms that 3SV is not effective as a general anti-slate measure.
In other news:
Fallout from the harassment incident that Alyssa Wong reported
BullSpec statement on the suspension of The Exploding Spaceship column: http://fb.me/FmvB6YVe
And something I noticed, following up on that on Twitter –
did we know before now that Jonathan Moeller’s nomination in novelette was withdrawn? I haven’t seen any discussion of it but a brief scan of his website would appear to indicate that he is a mostly self-published author, who had one thing published by Cast/alia. Unless I’ve missed something he just withdrew himself without much ado. Fair play* to him if so.
(*In Ireland this means something like “all credit to him” but seems to me especially appropriate in this context.)
Mark:
I guess I’m a bit more optimistic that voters will act more decisively when presented with an explicit slate-detection stage
It’s not just decisiveness; it’s knowledge. How am I supposed to know that The Builders and Perfect State would not have reached the ballot without a slate? Mediocre stuff does reach the ballot sometimes. If these had been shortlisted in a non-slate year, I might have thought ‘voters are weird’, but I would not have thought ‘how on earth can that be considered…?’
See: The Day The World Turned Upside Down.
DragonCon has a banquet where two longtime awards are given — the Julie Award named after Julius Schwartz and the Hank Reinhardt Fandom Award. There’s also a new (and very cool) Eugie for the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction.
Surely the Dragon Awards will be announced at that banquet, though that isn’t stated on the con site anywhere I could find.
I registered to vote today here. After I clicked a link to verify my email, I was told, “Congratulations you have registered for voting. We will sent your ballot email in the next batch on Monday morning.”
It’s weird that the ballot is so hard to find. It’s only being sent to fans after they register to vote. Here’s it is.
@brightglance
I predicted it back in April, based on the original nomination statistics. My estimate of the absolute number of puppies was off by almost a factor of two (I think I know why), but I definitely got the shape of the curve right: I correctly predicted all of the withdrawals.
brightglance:
He was never on the public list of finalist, he withdrew before the shortlist was announced. If he ever mentioned something about it, it didn’t become big news.
(There where however speculations about it, e.g. Greg Hullender here.)
ETA: Oh well, ninjaed by Greg.
@Andrew M
I’m pretty sure the intention of 3SV is to allow the community to remove works that are meant to discredit the award. People don’t need to do more than skim “Safe Space as Raperoom” or “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” to realize they’re inappropriate. Anything that requires close analysis to determine whether it’s Hugo-Worthy or not should not be a candidate for elimination by 3SV.
I think the mistake people are making is that they’re thinking of 3SV as a solution to the problem of slating, but it isn’t. It’s a solution to the problem of griefing.
New thread alert. (Much like this one.)
Anyone read this year’s Campbell Award winner, Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman? I’ve never heard of the author, and the work didn’t make the Hugo longlist or the Nebula shortlist. Is it worth adding to the ever-growing Mount TBR?
Wait, what? I though that this year the Campbell was won by Andy Weir.
<googling>
Oh, this is a different award. It’s for Best Novel, not Best New Writer. I’m not actually familiar with this particular Campbell award. (Or Eleanor Lerman, for that matter.) It’s a juried award, apparently associated with the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction out of the University of Kansas. So today I’m one of the Lucky 10,000….
I’m pretty sure the intention of 3SV is to allow the community to remove works that are meant to discredit the award.
I’m not sure what the intention of the proposers was (some of them did seem to see it as a possible replacement for EPH) but I agree that this is the best justification for it. But in that case my original point holds; EPH does not fully solve the problem of slating, and 3SV does not plug the gap, being useful only against abuse. This is shown by this year’s Novella results, which are not touched (it seems – there’s still a bit of puzzle there) by EPH, and would not be touched by 3SV if it were used only against abuse.
Anyone read this year’s Campbell Award winner, Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman?
That’s the Campbell Memorial Award. (Just so it doesn’t get confused with the award for new writer, the award that comes with the tiara.)
Yeah, I should have been more specific. It’s the Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of 2015. Usually announced at the Campbell Conference (held at Worldcon, this year) and usually announced along with the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for short fiction (won this year by The Game of Smash and Recovery by Kelly Link).
@brightglance
Actually, I notice that the declines were as follows:
Black Gate
Thomas Mays
Jonathan Moeller
Anne Sowards
Zenopus
RGUS
I’m aware of as Black Gate and Mays from coverage here, but was there any news regarding the others?
Oneiros said:
It took a little digging, but– ta-daaa! Sunday, September 4, 2:30-3:30pm, completely separate from the banquet rcade mentioned.
@Petréa Mitchell: it didn’t even occur to me to check the schedule. Oh well! Hopefully they’ll have enough time to do everything they need to do between close of voting and the ceremony.
On the question of the effectiveness of 3SV: I think we can safely say that if VD himself ever appears on a ballot again, 3SV will have been shown to have failed. Not only is he objectively a crappy editor, but even if he had the skills, he seems to be too busy trolling the world to ever spend the time it takes for competent editing.
Likewise, if something like “SJWs Always Rape Spaces” shows up, again, we’ll know that 3SV doesn’t work.
Other than that, I can’t really think of a way to check.
Of course, this means that if VD turns his attention elsewhere (after proclaiming himself victorious again), then we won’t really be able to test its effectiveness, but, y’know what? Not needing to test it will be a victory too! Not having VD on the ballot is a Good Thing™ no matter how we get there! 🙂
@Xtifr: Careful now, it’s sounding a lot like you’re setting up a Xanatos Gambit… and come to think of it, I’ve never seen you and Beale in the same room before…
@Oneiros: I’m afraid I’m not quite enough of a sooper-genius, because, no matter how hard I try, I cannot find a way to spin VD-appears-on-the-final-ballot as a victory!
If I manage to do that, I may start suspecting myself of being VD in disguise. 😀
eta: and not just for the obvious reason. 😉
@brightglance:
Wow. My jaw has dropped.
Who knew (sarcasm) that you could both assert the nonintentionality of a harassment act yet still acknowledge the greater importance of the harm caused by harassment act, and hold the harassers appropriately accountable?
This, folks, is how you do it.
@Jim Henley (re Dragons): That’s kinda what I said… somewhere earlier here. If they aren’t actually doing the admin, it at least has their “style” written all over it.
@IanP: Maybe Tron Guy is the administrator, so he doesn’t need the Circle of Trust. Perhaps he and Declan Finn (and their iPhone) are running it.
@Bruce Arthurs: There are a lot of people doing weird taxidermy/clothing work. I would bet money that there are stuffed hamsters out there dressed like that.
@brightglance: Kudos to the editor for finally standing up against these improperly-socialized persons (Angela and Gerald Blackwell). Although it shouldn’t have taken THREE cons’ worth of harassment to get them uninvited from the company of civilized people. Were they expelled from MACII? Their violation of the CoC seems much greater than MRK’s or even DT’s. They actually laid hands on other people, which is assault and battery. Side note: website says they mostly review(ed) Baen.
Remember, Beale’s primary motivation in making life choices is “Will this get up John Scalzi’s nose? If not, can I make some sort of argument that it has and get people to believe me?”
So I don’t think the Dragon Awards will be the chew toy that satisfies.
The Sads, maybe. The Rabids, no.
I don’t think any proposal that involves leaving Puppy shit on the ballot as official nominees/finalists will meet with much acceptance. The point of those measures is to get the Puppy shit off the ballot, so that “At least we got SJWS ALWAYS LIE permanently honored as a finalist, ha ha I bet that got up John Scalzi’s nose real good” does not remain a spur to continuing to nominate shit.
@Kurt Busiek:
And, with all respect for Hyman Rosen’s good intentions with his amendment (/me waves), IMO for 3SV to have any real point, qualification stage voters needed the means to vote totally unsuitable nominees entirely off both final ballots and the Long List. I didn’t rise to voice that objection because it seemed obvious, and I figured the assembly would already lean that way — which I infer they did. (FWIW, we had such a busy agenda all four days, I kept my peace on a ‘closed mouth gathers no foot’ theory, and also to avoid wasting folks’ time.)
I’ll poke in on this one, since I know some of the parties involved, and say that I think Bull Spec’s editor didn’t know what had happened until this week. These weren’t reporters or anything, just some fans who happened to write for him in addition to their various other gigs. And unlike Truesdale, it wasn’t a publically discussed thing until just a day or two ago, and the names weren’t out there unless you had major reason to dig. (I was at ConCarolinas myself, and it’s not like anybody informed us There Has Been An Incident, ya know?)
And since BullSpec wasn’t paying their way or anything, I don’t know if the con would think to contact their editor there. (I mean, heck, I’ve written for like five magazines and four publishers, and if I got booted from a con I was at on my own dime, would somebody sit down and draft a letter “Dear Publisher, RedWombat was a blithering idiot today…”?)
So I honestly don’t think he actually knew about any of it until just now, and I do think he acted very quickly when he did find out. It’s the usual problem of communication–how do we get information broadly dispersed across an informal network when cons don’t talk to each other very much?
@lurkertype: I think it’s in the nature of healthy responses to harassment cases to gradually escalate.
Indeed, it’s often the mere fact that harassment repeats that make people feel comfortable shifting from “maybe that was a one-off, and now that it’s been clearly addressed, the person can go forth and harass no more,” into “No, this is an ongoing problem, and this needs to be publicly known.” Public accusations are a big thing – and three incidents is a total of one incident more than the absolute minimum to say “Oh, recurring problem.”
Sharing information about harassment incidents is a sticky business. On the one hand, most incidents really shouldn’t be public knowledge, for the benefit of everybody involved; on the other hand, identifying recurring cases is of huge importance. In this particular case, Wong herself was able to make the connection between two different cons, but in a lot of other cases you’ve got recurring harassment that nobody really has the tools to identify. (If anybody’s familiar with resources on the topic, I’d absolutely love to read some, for my own local conventions.)
And, Alyssa Wong describes both the WisCon and the MACII response teams as being excellent; I certainly don’t think there’s any discredit here to either of them. I don’t know whether the harassers were expelled or not, but I think we can trust the teams here.
So… all in all, given that this is a difficult issue to handle well, it sounds like responses to incidents are getting pretty darn good.
In the long run, that’s what’s going to make the difference. Feet on the ground; change the norms. You’re never going to stop all of harassment, but you can make it unacceptable, unambiguous, and dealt with swiftly. And it sounds to me like that’s actually happening 🙂
@brightglance: Thanks for the info, and kudos to “Bull Spec.”
@lurkertype: “Were they expelled from MACII? Their violation of the CoC seems much greater than MRK’s or even DT’s.” – I asked/wondered the same thing and feel the same. I was thinking they weren’t booted (from reading Wong’s feed), but someone else reading the same feed was thinking they were. We may never know, but I can’t help wondering. (grin&shrug)
(Oh, and sniping at Baen… is that really necessary? I don’t see any reason to tar either one with the other. That’s the kind of sweeping generalization that’s sure to be insulting.)
Good for Bull Spec; they seem to have acted quickly once they were alerted to the situation and taking that action isn’t easy when it’s a friend of yours.
Missed the edit window – seconding Standback’s comment about Baen. Lots of people read Baen – it isn’t an indication of anything. (Except perhaps a high tolerance for awful cover art.)
Just got my Dragoncon ballot. The confirmation email had said the next batch would go out next Monday morning, which is a bit close, so this is more convenient.
Just a small point; I’m reading on my tablet which auto-refreshes tabs as I move between them. I left the confirmation tab open – thank you for registering – and on refreshing it told me that I’d already registered – full name sent back to me. If anyone were so inclined, running through possible URLs would get them a list of names used to sign up. Tsk, tsk, that’s lax security.
@Meredith
Except perhaps a high tolerance for awful cover art.)
And really bad copy editing sometimes! Baen has a few authors that I generally autobuy…Bujold, Hodgell/Godstalk, Lee and Miller/Liad Universe, and Spencer/Elfhome & Alien Taste series. Some have good copy quality, some…not so much. But I also agree with Standback’s point about Baen.
ps: Really glad you’re back. Sending all the karma/good vibes/whatevers that I can for you to feel even better.
@junego
Ha, yes, the copy can be rubbish, too.
I’m happy to be back. Hopefully it will stick this time; been a rough year what with one thing and another.
Xtifr: On the question of the effectiveness of 3SV: I think we can safely say that if VD himself ever appears on a ballot again, 3SV will have been shown to have failed. I take your point in general, but note that this technically incorrect: 3SV can’t be applied until 2018, as rules changes have to be confirmed at another Worldcon before taking effect. (Yes, there may be exceptions to the tell-them-twice rule, but this isn’t one of them.)
This characterization doesn’t match what the editor said in announcing their suspension. They’re columnists, longtime financial supporters and people at Worldcon “specifically as representatives of Bull Spec” to cover the convention. That’s a much closer ongoing relationship, which I presume is why he felt it necessary to take the action he did.
One thing this incident shows is that fans told not to contact someone need to heed it, even after the con. I understand that some people want to reach out and apologize. But this isn’t a situation where that’s appropriate, particularly in a face-to-face setting. It’s likely to frighten the person.
People who are that aggressive in apologizing are not actually attempting to apologize. If they wanted to express regret for their actions, they would do so and back off. What they’re trying to do is receive forgiveness and absolution for their acts, and when their victims veer off the script they’ve laid out in their heads, then (to give it the most charitable interpretation) their brains short-circuit.
Not to make any excuses, but I think some people accused of bad behavior decide they need forgiveness from their victim as proof they’re not bad people.
In college I lived in a dodgy neighborhood next to a family of hard drinkers who freaked out my girlfriend and I with their behavior. My uncle helped us move and we were driving away for the final time. I had just told him about the neighbors.
Suddenly out of the darkness stepped the mom, drunk as Cooter Brown, blocking his truck. She gestured at us with a crutch and kept mumbling, “We’s good people; we’s good people.”
My uncle is a Fighting Farmer carved from granite who doesn’t scare. I still laugh about the look on his face as he drawled, “What. The. Hell.”
@rcade: I agree; it’s best to steer clear of analyzing people’s intentions and motivations. It’s a tough situation to be in, and leaving things be can feel awful.
Which is more charitable towards the harasser, without excusing them in any way. This isn’t about assigning blame. It’s about understanding the lay of the land, as it stands, and making things better.
IMO, the important things are (a) make it crystal clear that “good intentions” do not make behavior any less harassing or more acceptable, and (b) for the response team and con staff to be the ones doing the norm-setting and harassment-stopping, with as little weight as possible placed on the individual person being harassed.
I’m not sure it’s actually charitable to say that someone is going through the motions of an apology in order to make themself feel better, while continuing to give no thought to the effect of their actions on the person they aggrieved. I regard that assertion as a potent condemnation. It’s possible to regard thoughtless brutality as less blameworthy than calculated brutality, I suppose, but when evaluating shittiness I usually don’t care much about such fine distinctions.
@rcade
This makes me very sad. I even think I understand what she’s trying to say–and what “bad people” would be. But I wouldn’t have wanted to live next to them either.
@Steven desJardins
When I was a gay activist, I cared a great deal about such distinctions. Our whole strategy was to gradually change people’s minds, and someone who stopped, thought about it, and wanted to apologize was greatly treasured. If they got something out of the apology too, then–hey–that was a win-win as far as I was concerned.
But it does amount to asking the victim to take responsibility for managing the terms of his/her harassment, and obviously that’s asking a lot. Especially if you’re just dealing with some random jackass and therefore you can’t convince yourself it’s a step toward changing the world.