174 thoughts on “Comments for August 31”

  4. I exchanged txts with Mike earlier.

    He says: Thanks for the incredible support and help! I miss being more active. Soon I think.

    I responded: “Only when you’re ready. We’re sort of *cough* holding the fort down, as it were.”

    Mike’s response: And doing awesomely! I read as much as I can.

    (In other words, he doesn’t know about the shoggoth yet.)

  11. So new plan.
    1. I have these tins of white paint
    2. I have this excellent digital projector
    3. we paint everything white; pizza boxes, mount wine-bottles, shoggoth, Arnold the Frost Giant and the collection of string and post notes we were using to settle that argument about EPH as it applies to fandom in non-coastal North American states with agrarian economies
    4. we project an IMAGE of a nice tidy File770 over the top of everything
    5. Mike never notices the difference

  12. Unwrapping and replacing the lamp found in the bathtub (?!?). At least there’s no green jello…

  14. we project an IMAGE of a nice tidy File770 over the top of everything

    The only weak link in the plan is where we can find one of those.

  15. @JJ

    Excellent, thanks for the tip. I’ve been eagerly waiting to see the file-related acceptances.

  17. “Westboro Baptist Church at Dragon Con?!?”

    They coming to protest? I thought it was to cheer on Wright.

  18. junego: I’m reeaaalllly behind on viewing comments, but has anyone seen or posted this? Westboro Baptist Church at Dragon Con?!?

    That site is a less-funny version of The Onion.

  20. I want to announce a vignitological comment here. I think, anyway.

  22. SciFi4Me did a bunch of taped videos at MidAmeriCon II.

    There’s one in there interviewing Kate Paulk, but I had to turn it off after about 3 minutes, because the interviewer was utterly clueless about the whole thing and had no idea what he was talking about, and the string of lies coming out of Paulk’s mouth was just un-fucking-believable. 🙄

  23. Life’s too short to listen to 18 minutes of whiny Kate.

    She is of course right. An award with 5000 nominating voters could do better. Did we ever establish how many sad puppy nominators there were this year? Dozens?

  24. The only weak link in the plan is where we can find one of those.
    Time to hit up some digital artists – we’ll have to fix it in post.

    Quick question. What if the shoggoth ate all my paint?

  25. Regarding yesterday’s thread of regretted teenage books: Isaac Asimov, The Sensuous Dirty Old Man.

    Compared with some of the “advice” proferred by contemporary “pick-up artists”, “Dr. A” is positively benign, so maybe I should count my blessings.

  27. Soooo I just finished Dark Run by Mike Brooks and I’m a bit torn. On the one hand it’s a book that does “semi lawless ‘verse full of diverse humans” MUCH better than Firefly’s “wow these Americans swear in ~Chinese!”. On the other hand, the characters were only just interesting enough to keep me going through an adequate plot, and I’m not sure why one particular character needed to be referred to as “the Maori” more times than “Apirana” (i.e. his name). Why is not every potentially great thing actually great! I think I’ll be following future reviews of this series to see if it gets better though.

    Now I’m reading Cat Valente’s first Fairyland book, a series which definitely won’t get better because Valente is already at peak magnificence and I’m only a couple of chapters in. Woop!

  28. I listened to Paulk. She doesn’t get any less duplicitous. Through the entire interview she (and actually, the interviewer) spew an almost continuous string of conspiracy theory paranoia.

  29. You don’t understand. I’m not stuck here commenting with you, you’re stuck here commenting with me.

  30. Today’s read — Ruby Red, by Kerstin Gier, translated from the German by Anthea Bell

    YA Fantasy; a girl raised to believe her cousin would inherit time-travel abilities discovers that she herself is the inheritor. I picked this one up during a spate of interest in time travel narratives that I had a while back, and then it languished on my To-Be-Read pile for a year or so because the cover was rather unprepossessing. Today I finally gave it a chance. And … meh. Even for the first book of a trilogy, it’s all set-up and nothing much happens. The main character is supposed to be secretly smart even though everyone thinks she’s not very bright, but she mostly comes off as plain old not very bright. I won’t be picking up the sequels.

  31. Right; the shoggoth has been removed to the big galvanized tub I put in the closet of the spare bedroom, with its stack of Perry Rhodan novels. (I think it’s happy; I lured it there by putting the books down in a trail…)

    Anyone have a Biohazard sign to put up on the closet door…?

    (Why, yes, there IS a monster in the closet. Why do you ask?)

  33. Hey, who got shoggoth slime all over the floor in the spare bedroom? I went in there to get my coat and now the soles of my shoes are melting.

  34. JJ: to be honest, The Onion folks are really good at what they do. The rest of us are almost inevitably going to be less funny when we try to that sort of thing.

    Not that it’ll stop us…

  36. I realize the shoggoth is the elephant in the room, but has anyone come up with a plan for catching the byakhee? I suspect they’re still flapping around in the corners. This would be easier if a sound brain could remember where they were last seen.

  38. Buncha common taters.

    ETA to Jack Lint: The shoggoth was supposed to take care of them! That was the whole reason… gah. I’m going back outside to wait for the truck.

  40. @nickpheas:

    Did we ever establish how many sad puppy nominators there were this year? Dozens?

    I think we concluded it was around 450 nominators and about 160 voters, based on the Vox Day nominations and votes in the end results.

  41. I think my mate Bob’s got a Hound of Tindalos. I could ask him to pop round with it, would that help?

  42. @Eric,

    Sorry, not the people of puppish inclinations who voted in the Hugo Awards, how many different people could be bothered to register and vote on Ms Paulk’s Sad Puppy campaign?
    For all that she was bemoaning works being nominated to the Hugos by 50 people, I seem to recall some things made it to her list with single digit nominations. And not ones that required the second hand to count them.

  43. I think my mate Bob’s got a Hound of Tindalos. I could ask him to pop round with it, would that help?

    I suggest that we simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes.

  44. @NickPheas – Sorry. Misunderstood the question and didn’t see the “sad” in your initial post.

    I should never comment in the mornings until after I’ve finished my first two-liter.

  45. If the shoggoth ate all the paint, including the cans it came in, we can forget about it eating the byakhee until at least Saturday. Is that too late?

  46. @Darren ahh Pikachu! They are well loved around these parts, though I’ve never been lucky enough to see one as big as the one on the left…

  47. Lis Carey, especially since the shoggoth seems to take the metaphor “devouring books” literally. It seems to be slowly dissolving and ingesting through its… integument… a paperback Perry Rhodan novel. I don’t know which one; it’s in German and the cover’s already disintegrated. I really hope we have a good supply of pulp fiction to feed it….

  48. You have to be careful feeding a shoggoth pulp fiction. The Spicy Zeppelin Stories might upset it digestive system(s). You don’t want a sick shoggoth about the house. And finding a vet who can treat them seems to be an utter impossibility.

  49. Jack Lint & Kip W,
    I’ve got a sound brain (in a Mi-Go cylinder) that I can put to work luring (summoning) the Byakhee somewhere else.

  50. @NickPheas

    Did we ever establish how many sad puppy nominators there were this year? Dozens?

    I found some clever ways to use the EPH data to deduce this. I’m going to put an article about it on Rocket Stack Rank in a couple of days, but the answer is that it varied by category. Max was 426 for Novella. Min was 311 for Fan Artist. That’s only counting people who voted the entire slate in that category, but, with a few exceptions, when someone voted for a slated item but did not vote for the entire slate, that was generally the only thing they voted for in that category.

    Best result is that in the top six categories (all I’ve checked so far) all of the “hostages” would have made the top 5 list even without the puppies. So the “hostage” strategy was an epic fail.

    ETA: I also missed “sad” in your post. In my estimates, I assume there were zero.

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