193 thoughts on “Off On A Comment 8/25”

  3. OK second at the moment, but once comments reach a long list of 15 then less popular comments will be progressively eliminated, accounting for the extent to which each comment is correlated with more popular comments, which will then pass to the wider membership who will be given a chance to eliminate some comments of an unsuitable nature before proceeding to a list of finalist comments from which, I hope, this one will be fifth.

  13. @Camestros Felapton: That’s an insanely complicated scheme! I’m just going to rank Dawn Incognito as fifth and ignore all other comments.

  14. Just read: The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, a novella from tor.com.

    It may be the year for reimagining Lovecraft, except that people have never stopped reimagining Lovecraft. Vellitt Boe is a scholar in the women’s college of the University of Ulthar, in the Lovecraftian Dreamlands. I have to say it’s a setting idea that just grabbed me from the start. Vellitt was a wanderer and explorer in her youth, meeting an Earthly dreamer named Randolph Carter among others, but is now middle aged and lecturing not adventuring. When a young student runs off for our real world, she has to find her old hiking boots (and sharp knife) and set off across the dreamlands after her.
    It’s very much a travelogue, and has some of the issues that come along with that – is this just a list of places she goes at authorial fiat? – but I think the character and the charm of the setting really pulls you along, and the stakes get built up nicely. I’m not sure how much you’d need to know Lovecraft’s dreamlands to appreciate it – I certainly found the mythos elements enriched it – and I think the ending wasn’t quite as strong as it might have been, but overall I enjoyed it.

    (Content note: two mentions of rape, in the sense of mentioning it has or could happen, not in the sense of featuring it in any way)

  15. I arrived on this earth with a comment and I expect to leave it with a comment.

    Outside of a Sad Puppy, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a Sad Puppy, it is too dark to read.

  16. Kate Paulk has announced the Sad Puppy 5 plans:https://madgeniusclub.com/2016/08/25/a-puppy-returns-from-worldcon-not-an-after-action-report/

    Sad Puppies 5 probably won’t focus on the Hugos – at this stage it’s looking more like being simply a recommended reading list with categories more or less along the lines of the Dragon categories (which, frankly, will be a damn sight easier to manage). More details will happen when Sarah or Amanda get to them. In the meantime, no the Sad Puppies are not defeated. We might seem like a collection of bumbling clumsy… well, puppies, but we love the genre and we’re not into widdling on things or burning them down.

    Sounds like a positive plan.

  17. Fifth, but only because during the Qualification Stage, the other candidates for Fifth were disqualified by No votes consisting of 60% of the total Yes or No votes…

  24. Hey, I’ll give the Sad Puppies a doggie-treat for explicitly saying they don’t want to widdle on things or burn them down. (I suppose, in the interest of fairness, that widdling on things is one way to keep them from burning down…)

  25. @Mark
    Thanks for the review. I was debating getting The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, a novella from tor.com yesterday. Your review makes it sound safe enough.

    @Camestros Felapton Sad Puppies 5 probably won’t focus on the Hugos – at this stage it’s looking more like being simply a recommended reading list

    SP5 sound like a fantastic idea. May they get many book recommendations and enjoy reading them. Go SP5! Rock your reading. 😀

  26. Well you know, Oceans 11, Three Amigos, Seven Samurai…I think”5? is still available.

    Five Children and It: Starring Larry Correia, Sarah Hoyt, Kate Paulk, John C. Wright, and Brad Torgersen. Featuring Vox Day as “It.”

  28. @Camestros

    I hope SP5 find themselves many fun books to read. Perhaps they’ll make themselves into a handy resource for Dragon Award eligibility – that would be a positive contribution that I’d welcome.

    It’s a little sad that after Paulk attended the business meeting and came over as something close to reasonable (her remarks were a bit pointed here and there, but so were other peoples), she has to blot that out by painting the BM attendees as the gaslighted victims of the perfidious SJWs. Sigh.

    ETA: Hampus wins today’s non-sequitur award.

  30. Yay, I just bought a mummified possum!

    I wonder what’s the world record for the number of times mummified possums have been randomly brought up in a blog? Twice sounds like a good estimate.

  31. Sad Puppies concentrating on boosting the books and authors they like to each other as opposed to trying to scam them Hugos? What a novel idea. To think, if it hadn’t been for the hurt feelings of LC, it might have been a productive idea from the start. Why, promote books you think are getting missed well enough, they could even capture enough interest to… win a Hugo.

    Seriously though, the focus on the Hugos by the puppies has been unhealthy. All they’ve managed to do is add a list of authors to my list that I won’t bother to try out on a whim and generate a hell of a lot of ill will.

  32. I am happy to see that the Sad Puppies leadership continues along the path of moderation that many non-Puppies have been encouraging for years: namely, presenting a list of stories and encouraging their audience to read those stories, rather than presenting slates that are tailor-made for dominating the Hugos.

    (If your response to that is “harrumph, the Sad Puppies were always presenting recommended-reading lists rather than slates, and it was just those wicked SJWs who tried to delegitimize the lists by calling them ‘slates’”, well, bless your heart.)

  34. I’m sure the Psammead would object and I expect that Vox may have problems with being a sand fairy.

    Five Easy Pieces? Five Million Miles to Earth? 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T?

  36. Mia Wallcace: “Fox Force Five. Fox, as in we’re a bunch of foxy chicks. Force, as in we’re a force to be reckoned with. Five, as in there’s one..two …three..four..five of us.”

  37. I do think the SP5 folks, if they really do anything at all, should change the name. Whether they like it or not, “puppies” is Vox Day’s brand now, and by continuing to use it, they tar themselves with his brush.

    I propose “Sad Possums.”

  38. Sad Puppies 5 probably won’t focus on the Hugos …

    It looks like Sad Puppies is evolving into something that all fans could support. I hope it focuses on finding excellent works and writers this year instead of treating that effort as a political cudgel.

    I’m glad Kate Paulk attended the business meeting and spoke up, but I don’t understand why she thinks anti-bloc voting measures like EPH and 3SV will hurt the Hugos.

  39. I have had many encounters with live possums throughout my life. Some in the great outdoors, but most ones that have managed to get into my house. The smallest ones were, I suppose, the time as a (IIRC) pre-teen when I made my mother pull over on the side of the road so that I could collect the babies clinging to a road-kill mother. (I bottle-fed them for a while, hanging from a finger by their tail, but eventually passed them on to some elderly great-aunts who finished raising them.) The largest ones were bigger than a typical adult cat. They are dumb, and slow. On the occasion that I walk into a room with a possum in it, I just pick it up by the tail and take it outside (they have squishy-feeling, muscular tails. You hold a mouse or rat by the tail, it will try to twist around to bite you–you hold a possum by the tail, it will climb its own tail hand-over-hand like a rope and climb up on your hand, not associating your hand with its predicament.)

    I have tried on several occasions to annoy a possum enough to make it “play dead”, but with no success. They always outlast my willingness to be a jerk to them. But on one occasion, an adolescent possum wandered into my living room and happened to walk past the spot where a cat had her kittens under a piece of furniture. The possum was minding his own business, completely unaware of the kittens. But the mother cat wasn’t willing to give the benefit of the doubt. She moved so fast that I literally could not see her coming. One moment, I was watching a possum walk across my living room–the next moment, there was a slightly larger cat with all 4 legs wrapped around the possum. And the possum was instantly out cold completely possumatonic. I untangled the cat from the possum, took the possum outside, and waited to see what happened. After a minute or two, the possum recovered itself and ambled off, possibly a bit confused. (Okay, probably a bit confused.

    Other random possum observations:

    1.) they groom themselves by licking their feet and running them through their fur like a cat–but use their BACK feet to do it.

    2.) they (or at least one that I watched for a while) blink one eye at a time, seconds apart, not (during my observation) both eyes at once.

    There should be a few of my possum photos on this page.

  40. @rcade I don’t understand why she thinks anti-bloc voting measures like EPH and 3SV will hurt the Hugos.

    At a guess: We are codifying being against wrongfans having wrongful into our voting rules which will hurt our image of Hugos being best SFF award voted on by SFF fans.

  41. Possums aren’t real they’re just another made-up animal US visitors use to wind up their European relatives, along with jackalopes and armadillos and Donald Trumps and the mythical ‘Arby’s.’

  42. It’s because Hoyt is dishonestly equating anti-slating measures with anti “grass-roots” (whatever that means to her) campaigning.

    In other words, if you dilute the power of bloc voting, you’re excluding the “grass-roots” and thus narrowing the appeal of the award. It’s bullshit, of course, but when you don’t have a real argument, bullshit will have to do.

  46. A Comment for Leibowitz
    The Comment & the Comment
    Ancillary Comment

    (Blatant attempt to jump the title-credit queue)

  47. SP5 is very much why I lean to the monopuppiest school of thinking.
    They have invested vast amounts of social capital in the Puppy brand. They damn well want to get something from it. The only person getting anything from it is Teddy. They are not so stupid that they don’t know this. Therefore the SP5 leadership thinks it can tap into Teddy’s base by using his brand, tainted as it is.

    Still, they were irrelevant this year, if it makes them happy…

  49. I went and took at look in at Mad Genius Club.
    And, you know, even though I actually saw Paulk at the Business Meeting with my own two eyes, I have to say it doesn’t sound as if we were at the same meeting.
    That is, she maunders off, in a more in sorrow than in anger sort of way, about how the folks at the Business Meeting were not so much SJWs as poor gaslighted fools doing their puppetmasters’ will, and then followed up with an explanation of where we go wrong politically.
    I must point out that there was absolutely no discussion at said meetings of pretty much anything except for the actual and esoteric details of the matters being decided.
    That is, whoever or wherever anyone at Kansas City might have been talking about PC anything, or affirmative this or that, it was not going on at the Business Meeting.
    So I’m not sure how she decided that those in attendance were not actual SJWs.
    Was this based on who voted for a YA award, or for sunset clauses, or the like – candidate diversity, after all, not equalling diversity per se.
    (And how’s that one for a lack of truth in labeling?)

    And the comments – why do i look the comments? – I know better.
    I can’t decide whether it is actual obtuseness, or simply an inability to honestly discuss slating, but it’s like watching a contortionist at work.
    Props to Spacefaringkitten and Camestros Felapton for their efforts at engaging, but I don’t think any actual communication occurred.

    But anyway, for filing under Puppy Projection, I did come across this gem in the comments:

    “Next year Worldcon is in Helsinki so I highly suspect attendance to dwindle, and out of sight means reduced supporting in all likelihood. 2018 in San Jose, west coast heart of the PC and SJW crowd. By then the Hugo Awards will almost certainly have faded into obscurity as the PTB, having taken them hostage and proven that when pressed they can totally destroy them, revert to their practice of incestuous back slapping and circle fornication.”

    Nah.
    I agree that by 2018 there will be “incestuous back slapping and circle fornication” going on, but not in San Jose.
    (Cf. Vox Day’s current claimed victory.)

  50. The only person getting anything from it is Teddy.

    Mad Genius Club has gotten a nice boost in traffic since it launched Sad Puppies 4, according to Alexa, and 17% of its searches are coming from the search terms “sad puppy” and “sad puppies 4.”

    I bet it was tempting to keep going for that reason. Paulk and the other MGC authors are at an earlier stage of their writing careers than Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen. It’s hard out here for a pimp (of your book).

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