A Puppy Epilogue

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By Mike Glyer: When the crowds watching the roundup in Times Square saw the last tag scroll off the news ticker (“…Lis Carey…”) there was complete silence for a moment.

Then an ancillary in the throng of unnervingly ambiguously gendered people lifted her voice and led everyone in singing, “May auld acquaintance be forgot….” People linked arms and swayed. Tears ran down their faces.

Mike watched Google Analytics until the Real-Time overview showed the first person had clicked on the roundup. After that she tabbed the edit page and checked the proper names again. She knew Jon F. Zeigler didn’t like seeing her name misspelled, and Laura could never understand why Mike always messed up “Tegan” yet seemed to have no problem with Gjovaag.

When that was done Mike stepped aside to let the carpenters through. Under the watchful eyes of a Smithsonian Institute curator they chopped the File 770 banner art free of its moorings at the top of the page. It fluttered into the arms of JJ and Kurt Busiek who rolled it up and hermetically sealed it in a case for shipment to Washington D.C., where it would be stored beside the Ark of the Covenant.

The band began to play. Commenters of every nation paraded into the stadium behind their national flags, smiling and waving. Simon Bisson, who had expected to carry the Isle of Jersey flag by herself, was surprised that some Alabama fans were eager to help.

When they passed the reviewing stand, Mike reached into a display case and gave Kyra and Alexandra Erin each a Hugo Award. Mike said how proud she was of the way they upheld the highest traditions of fannish humor. They hesitated until Mike reminded them she could easily spare a couple — she still had 48 more.

Meanwhile, Meredith served the cake Rachel Swirsky’s agent had sent to thank everyone in social media for giving “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” the third-highest Q-score after Shakespeare and the Bible, and gaining her client a new $3.4M contract for her next short story.

Soon Lee asked Peace Is My Middle Name for an autograph. Taking back the signed album she was pleasantly surprised to learn Peace’s first name was Love and her last name was Hope.

Simon Bucher-Jones won the swimsuit competition. Kary English was voted Miss Congeniality.

As Brian Z and Tuomas Vainio sat on the slopes of Mount Doom watching for eagles, Tuomas asked, “I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales?” Brian promised they would, “Because I intend to write them.”

The Imperial Star Destroyer aligned with the airlock. The seals blew and the door flew off in a cloud of white smoke. All the trolls whose first comments had never made it out of moderation were loaded aboard lifeboats and fired toward the surface of Tatooine.

Then Mike woke up. She wasn’t back in Kansas. It hadn’t been a dream.

[Hat tip to Ian Frazier’s “The Last Segment.”]

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187 thoughts on “A Puppy Epilogue”

  1. Ooooooooooooooooooooooo!

    Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

    Love it!

    (plus, FIRST)

  2. Oh, Mike. That was lovely.

    Thanks for that, and for all that you’ve done for us here — providing such a wonderful community for people who agree on some things, disagree on others, are more widely-read than the Library of Congress, and congenially agree to disagree by discussing favorite desserts.

  7. Now I can finally admit that I never knew exactly what the old photo logo was….

  12. “A Puppy Epilogue” – you’re saving “A Tail Of Two Puppies” for your retrospective summary?

    Hmm – you could probably get a book deal on this…

  14. delurk

    *slow clap*

    Thanks for the round ups and being OGH these past few months, Mike. I’m sticking around in lurker mode.

    I’ll support you in email.

    relurk

    ETA: and thanks for the SJW edit commands, and all the great recs from the commentariat!

  17. lovely! What a wonderful place and community you have cultivated. I have enjoyed it here and look forward to continuing to do so.

  18. Thank you, Mike, for the wonderful job you’ve done with all this. Looking forward to seeing you in person in Spokane later this summer.

  19. What a terrific outro!

    I first came here from… not sure; probably a link in either Making Light or Whatever. Soon I was visiting multiple times per day, coming for the kerfuffle roundups and staying for the regular reporting.

    You’ve done a great thing here. Not only the roundups, but the community of commenters: wrestling with Big Issues, writing filks and poems and allegories about the Hugo War of 2015, and discussing what they were reading. Oh, and arguing over the fine points of … well, everything, sf-related and not.

    I hope the community survives. I enjoy visiting, and putting in a comment myself now and then.

    Thanks for everything, and this is by no means “goodbye.”

    ETA: Love the new banner!

  21. Nick Mamatas on July 6, 2015 at 8:32 pm said:
    What am I, chopped liver?

    I shall now recite my extended family’s traditional response:

    “No. Chopped liver is more expensive.”

  22. Beautifully done. I will miss these roundups. They’ve been my favorite morning reading for weeks now, partly because they saved me from having to open incognito windows to check on *ahem* certain people’s blogs. Regardless, your wretched hive of scum and villainy now has a fixed spot in my RSS feed.

  24. Dammit, who let the onion-cutting ninjas in?

    Anyways, thanks for the round-ups Mike – the effort and annoyance it must have caused you was no small feat, and it’s something that I am grateful for. Also, thanks for your moderation, both in keeping the more obvious trolls out, and to gently hinting to others when emotions run high and judgement needs a tune-up ::embarassment::

    I look forward to seeing what comes up regularly here (RSS ppl!)!

  25. So long and thanks for all the round-ups, Mike . . . except you will remain in my feed reader regardless. 😉 Thanks for all that work to keep us up-to-date, and thanks to everyone for all the book chat – and more serious talk – and filking silliness.

    /99.9% lurker

  26. Mike, thank you. That was great.

    I’ll keep coming around though, for whatever wretched scum and villany you come up with in the future.

  27. Weirdest shared hallucination of my life. Thanks for all the fish, Mike. I look forward to more booksquee here, and hope to meet some of you at Sasquan. (That includes you, Brian Z.) 🙂

  30. That was fantastic, Mike. I… I got nothin’.

    We will note the irony of the guy who writes super-long comments being lost for words.

    Goodnight, folks.

  33. This is no goodbye, it’s auf wiedersehen (pet).

    We all know we’re gonna have to do this again after August.

    But for now, let me join in the thanksgiving. I’ve been following File 770 for donkeys but this year you truly came into your own. Let’s see if we can’t take that hugo count up to 49 next year…

  34. Mike – and everybody else who has contributed over the past months – thanks for these roundups and commentary. It’s been enlightening and entertaining, and it was worth every minute I spent reading.

  37. Gabriel F.: I love you guys. I’m staying. Sorry, Mike, you’re not getting rid of us!

    Yeah, bugger that. I’M NOT LEAVING.

    I’ll order pizza.

  39. “I’ll order pizza.”

    There were some really good pizza recommendations a few posts back….

  41. We might want to avoid the BBQ, I think that was the single most divisive issue we’ve discussed here.

  42. snowcrash: There were some really good pizza recommendations a few posts back…

    I’ve ordered a variety of combinations, including meat-free, lactose-free, and gluten-free.

    But those of you vile heathens who insist on ham + pineapple are S.O.L. 😡

  43. That was beautiful. Thank you all, on behalf of one of your many quiet lurkers – the invisible dark matter that makes up so much of the social Internet! 🙂

  45. And they walked away together through the hole in the wall, back into the darkness, leaving nothing behind them; not even the doorway.

  46. Note: Insert here that one GIF of Orson Wells clapping. I have it around here somewhere…

    I really appreciate this blog- in reading the news of fandom, I’ve felt anger, amusement and joy. And I’ve also felt connected to, and experiencing larger fandom in a way that I haven’t in quite a few years. Thank you.

  48. Is it write like a Raadch day already?

    (And thanks for all the hard work!)

  49. Thanks Mike for all the round-ups, and thanks everyone for all the comment threads, it’s been fun.

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