Larry Correia won’t be one of the guests when the Origins Game Fair takes place June 13-17 in Columbus, OH. Shortly after publicizing that Correia had been added to the lineup, John Ward, the event’s Executive Director, received so many negative social media comments (on Twitter, particularly) that he announced Correia’s invitation has been rescinded.
Ward wrote on Facebook:
I want to discuss our invitation to Larry Correia a guest at Origins. By all counts he is a very talented author.
Unfortunately, when he was recommended I was unaware of some personal views that are specifically unaligned with the philosophy of our show and the organization.
I want to thank those of you that brought this error to our attention. Origins is an inclusive and family friendly event. We focus on fun and gaming, not discourse and controversy.
I felt it necessary to recend [sic] his invitation to participate in the show. I apologize again to those of you that were looking forward to seeing him at Origins.
John Ward, Executive Director
Many of the critical tweets mentioned Correia’s history with Sad Puppies.
Correia subsequently responded on Facebook with a statement that begins:
So I’m no longer the writer guest of honor at origins. My invitation has been revoked. It was the usual nonsense. Right after I was announced as a guest some people started throwing a temper tantrum about my alleged racist/sexist/homophobic/whatever (of course, with zero proof or actual examples), and the guy in charge (John Ward) immediately folded. He didn’t even talk to me first. He just accepted the slander and gave me the boot in an email that talked about how “inclusive” they are….
His statement also says “none of these people can ever find any actual examples of me being sexist, racist, or homophobic.”
BEFORE AND AFTER:
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@Ingvar —
Investistoated?
Oh, and to whomever it was who accused JJ of “hiding” (I forget if it was Eric or David, and I’m not going to go back to look): I have had people actually show up at my house unannounced and undesired on more than one occasion (and in more than one town, both before and after I moved from one to the other) because of using my real name/personal info online. So no, thank you, you don’t need to know it.
Must resist urge to repost Yuri on Ice!!! clip.
JJ
I failed to apprehend that you were being specific. D-awk!
@Contrarius
*snerk*
As it happens, my handle here is my wallet name, which I’m using here so people who know me from print fandom, Usenet, or cons will know who I am.. But I could have been posting as “Vanessa Watson” for the past few years, and most people would assume that was my real name, someone they just hadn’t met/heard of before.
A variation on my standard example: Ctein and I are both using our legal names. “Mary Jane Olsen” was an alias/cover identity for a member of the Weather Underground.
If you actually care about who, offline, the people you’re talking to online are, your due diligence shouldn’t consist of “that looks like a normal name.”
@Lurkertype: “On neural nets, Scalzi didn’t invent the concept, and I came across something just the other day that had a very similar concept by the same name. IIRC, there was the thing in… was it “Neuromancer” or an earlier Gibson book, where people rented out their bodies while their brains were turned off?”
Scalzi’s version of the implanted hardware is eerily similar to what I separately came up with, enough so that in reading his novel I had a couple of “oh, I hadn’t thought of that complication” moments.
The answer is both simple and horrifying: Because I’ve seen worse. Much worse. I still have flashbacks to the novel where someone in charge “took the rains.” Not the correct “reins” or the commonly erroneous “reigns,” but liquid water that falls from the sky.
Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters?
@PJE: “I can come up with three good bad examples of formatting problems in e-books, two of which are from major houses.”
Drop-cap issues are so common that I ultimately made my own style for them and saved it as a snippet that I can paste in when needed. (Sub/superscripts, too.) The complication with vertical spacing is that different platforms can render the same instructions differently… so it may have looked fine on the publisher’s test platform.
The issue I grind the remains of my teeth over with respect to paragraph oddities is when people insist on using hard spaces instead of styles to indent the first line. As for split photos… yeah, often there’s no good way to handle those. A related issue in the book I’m currently reading is that the drawings scattered through the book are too damned small to see clearly. I may crack the book open later and see if they’re really that tiny, or if a CSS change will help. (This reminds me that I need to translate an image of Cyrillic lettering into actual character glyphs… in an Expanse ebook.)
@Ctein: “I am a slow and crappy typist who can think and compose far faster than he can peck at keys. Voice transcription can keep up with my thoughts — I can write about three times faster this way.”
Fascinating. My experience is exactly the opposite; I can type thoughts much more quickly than I can verbalize them, especially when composing fiction.
@JAA: “If I were Toni Weisskopf, and I knew some of my writers wanted heavy editing and some wanted a very light touch, and I knew there was roughly the same division among those writers’ readers, I would put people on those books who would do that kind of job for that particular book, writer, and audience.”
Or, if the sales figures don’t change appreciably between books which receive thorough copyediting and those which do not, the publisher can save even more money by simply firing all their copyeditors.
@DKMK: “I thought I was done. I wanted to be done. But some people here comment seemingly without actually having read what they’re commenting about.” and “I didn’t know the short amount of time involved [between Origins extending and withdrawing Correia’s invitation] when I first commented”
Pot, meet kettle. Perhaps now you understand why those of us who are intimately familiar with the subject matter have so little patience for your insistence on voicing opinions without first educating yourself on the facts.
All the quotations you could ever want are… over at Correia’s blog. Go straight to the source, and you won’t even have to wonder if he’s being quoted out of context – bonus! You could also try going to the File 770 front page and finding his name in the tag cloud to see past articles related to him. Mike’s good about quoting a representative portion of an article and linking back to the source document for those who want to see it in context.
Look, it’s fine if you don’t want to read Correia’s blog; neither do I. What is not fine is for you to form and express opinions about his character and whether he deserves certain treatment without familiarizing yourself with his own words. It is not our job to do your research. The proper course of action is either to do some reading so that you can participate with knowledge or to drop out of the discussion of a subject about which you have chosen to remain ignorant.
For someone who “[has] no desire to put energy into hating a man who’s done nothing to me or those I most love,” you sure have spent considerable effort and energy in saying how horrible it is that Origins decided not to keep Correia on as a GOH. You don’t know what you’re talking about, you refuse to read up on the subject, but by golly, you have an opinion and you’re going to make damned sure it’s heard!
First of all, the “self-anointed crusader” bit is wholly irrelevant except as a demonstration that you are trying to slant the discussion. Tim got uninvited because someone exposed a truth about his fanzine. Who that was and where they live do not change the fact that they told the truth. Tim’s zine does not have staff; he personally selects everything printed in it… including the racist jokes that earned him that “public slap in the face.”
If you don’t want to be held responsible for saying bad things, don’t say them. If you not only say them, but celebrate how “un-PC” you are for doing so, then you have fully earned the negative consequences of getting caught saying them.
In all three cases (including John Ringo and ConCarolinas), I fully agree with Ctein’s reply to you:
…and the rest of his message. Yes, in all three cases the concom erred in not properly vetting someone before making them a GOH. Yes, it would have been best if the invitations had never been extended in the first place… but they were. The best option the concom then has is to withdraw the invitation ASAP, perhaps with reimbursement for related expenses that have been incurred. Leaving the bad guest on the ticket says, “we know what he did, we’re okay with it, and we think he is a fine representative of our community who deserves to be lauded and feted for his contributions to it.”
Because that is what a con does when they make someone a GOH. That’s what those letters mean. As to your reply, though:
“Violation of the social contract.” Yes, that’s an excellent way to sum up Correia’s actions in founding the Sad Puppies campaign and sabotaging one of the SFF community’s most sacred awards for multiple years. Why would any self-respecting convention ever invite someone who did that to be their GOH? Perhaps through ignorance, in which case the proper course of action is to rescind the invitation and apologize profusely for the error in judgment… like Origins did.
Abso-fucking-lutely.
Oh, I’m sure he’ll get some invites to Puppy-friendly cons here and there that think sabotaging the Hugos was a great and glorious thing… but he’s not going to grow his audience much that way.
@RedWombat
On Vinge: my reactions were flipped opposite. I thought Fire was a passable science fantasy adventure. Deepness, on the other hand, left me pondering philosophical concepts well after reading it. The Peace War is still my favorite Vinge though.
Before we start speculating one whether we should stop barring someone for past anti-social or anti-group behavior, isn’t the first step that they *demonstrate they have changed as a person?*
You don’t re-invite a serial harasser unless they have spent the last decade not harassing people and working for social justice. Or you’ll have yet another example of harassment on your hands.
You don’t re-invite someone into the field who decided his best course after being a finalist but not a winner in a respected award is to send all his cronies to either steal or destroy the award. Especially when he’s still making it clear he has no regrets about doing so.
And don’t wring your hands about how he can ever prove he’s repented from the outside. There are a lot of other fields out there besides SF conventions. Including many the SF community can see – like SF publishing (I hear his books do well and get an audience.), fanzines, blogging (I hear his site is pretty popular, and he’s got access to many other forums.) If Correia ever changes his mind — not about his politics, he can keep those, but about what it meant that he was trying to actively steal an award and mess with its rules, or about insulting everyone who disagrees with him — he has the means to be heard.
In the meantime, anyone who argues that his failing to get the award is like refusing to give Jesse Owens his medal… nope. His first one was a legitimate vote, he came in behind someone else. You don’t give the silver medalist the Gold. His next attempts? Are less like refusing Jesse Owens and more like refusing Lance Armstrong.
___________________
(For the record; the convention screwed this up, and have not at all covered themselves with glory. I don’t praise their action. I concede they did the best they could with a bad situation they got themselves into, but that’s different.
I once drove a snowmobile into a ditch. Sure, I got myself out with no damage to myself or the machine, but I still made the initial screw-up too, so no glory in that.)
I’ve got a theory, it could be weasels…
@Eric Ashley:
Yes, you get a whole comment to yourself.
You seem surprised. Were you perhaps led to believe that “Vile770” is a place that deletes dissenting opinions and heaps hatred upon anyone who dares to hold conservative political views?
It’s true that the regulars here tend to be liberal rather than conservative, and I’ll do Dann the courtesy of pointing him out as an exception. Over time, though, most online communities tend to self-sort like that. Try finding liberals over at MGC, Correia’s site, or VD’s blog…
More accurately, much of their work suffers from Original Cliche Syndrome. (That’s when someone creates an original work which inspires numerous similar works from a variety of other people. A newcomer to the field encounters the derived works first, then sees the original as hackwork that’s been done to death.)
Boy, don’t you even try to “educate” me about the South. (And you think I’m gaslighting you?)
Tri reeding a buik taht loks liek thsi sumtiem and tehn com bak and sae that.
What’s revealing is that you present this as a binary choice… that you can have competent prose or a good story, but not both. That’s bollocks. Would you buy a car that goes from zero to sixty in two seconds, but has no headlights? No, you’d insist on getting a full-featured car.
It’s your money, though. If you want to spend it on poorly-made goods, go right ahead.
Ah, the capital-E “Establishment,” eternal foe of the… conservatives… who historically like for things to stay the same and not change. To remain established, as it were.
I must confess, this part of the modern “conservative” brand has never made sense to me. It’s right up there with passing a trillion-dollar tax cut in the name of fiscal responsibility.
Q: How can I find out if it’s raining in [distant place]?
A: Well, you could play Jenga with string cheese.
Oh, I don’t doubt it one bit. Trans people were told they would be kicked out of the military. Gay people were told they couldn’t get married. Women are told they can’t get health insurance that covers birth control. White punks can carry AR-15s in broad daylight, but unarmed black men get shot in the back for being “threatening.” Heck, wouldja believe a group of sad, rabid SF fans even tried to tell a convention that it couldn’t administer its own awards the way they’d been doing for decades?
Fucking bigoted assholes just mess things up for everybody, amirite?
Oh, wait… were you going somewhere else with that subject? 😀
(And then, one reading list later…)
What’s this? The defender of Objectively Best Books admits that mileage may vary, that tastes in books can differ? Oh, my stars and garters, what IS this world coming to?
@Eric Ashley:
I didn’t forget about you. My response to assorted comments of yours is currently in moderation. It may have something to do with posting three lengthy comments in relatively quick succession.
(Since I had many comments to catch up on, I composed my replies while reading and had two of them ready to go when I reached the end. Yours, the third, I composed “live” and submitted less than an hour later. This may have triggered a spam trap that flagged my reply to you for manual approval. If so: sorry, Mike!)
@David K. M. Klaus:
While I agree that adopting schadenfreude as a way of life is dysfunctional and toxic, feeling it now and then is pretty much a universal experience. I apport this song from the Broadway show Avenue Q as both carefully argued proof and a fun song in its own right:
@rochrist: I’m not so sure that’s true. Isn’t Maia’s quest to learn how to be the Emperor he wishes to be?
@JJ @ rochrist: I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right. He’s on a quest to master court intrigue, politics, and bureaucracy — a truly terrifying quest, indeed.
I’d agree with these descriptions of his journey–I should have been more specific in my comment but was typing on phone (hate that). I was thinking of the Archetypal (aka stereotypical) Monomyth (monotonous) HERO’S JOURNEY (flourish of trumpets), as defined by Jung and Campbell that plagued literary criticism (especially in the work on fantasy and children’s literature) for so long. So there is a quest but it is not T*H*E* Quest with all the manly accessories including a sword that goes *ting.*
I think Addison does a fantastic job of tweaking those conventions in her novel.
David K. M. Klaus commented on Origins Game Fair Drops Larry Correia as Guest.
Here, let me help you:
https:\\www.google.com
“Copyediting probably] does not matter that much.”
If anybody had copyedited David Weber’s Honor Harrington books, I might not have quit reading them because (1) they were at least one third deeply boring repetition and (2) it was impossible for anyone honestly to disagree with the protagonist because she was always right.
John A Arkansawyer on May 16, 2018 at 3:44 am said:
Let me be crystal clear that in all the interactions with Bujold I have had in person and seen on line, I have never seen her denigrate her publisher (other than occasionally about covers).
However, from what comments she has made about beta (and for all I know, gamma) readers I am of the opinion that she strives to make her manuscripts as flawless as possible before turning them in, and then asks to readers on the Bujold e-list to please crowdsource and report to her typos and inconsistencies when reading the electronic Advance Reader Copies (e-ARCs) of her Vorkosigan books. Between that and some errors that have crept into the final books that were present in the e-ARCs I am definitely under the strong impression that Baen does not do much, if any, proofreading or copy editing on the manuscript.
Regardless of an author’s personal preferences, I consider proofreading and copy editing the manuscript before publishing to be a fundamental responsibility of the publisher. It doesn’t matter how good the author is, that step needs to be done as a service to the readers.
(And those authors who self-publish should pay for that service, too. I’ve DNFd some books, both indy and trade published, that had good characters and plot because the horrible lack of proofing and copy editing made them unreadable.)
@Msb:
What you describe is not copyediting.
A copyeditor deals with mechanical issues – shifting tenses, misplaced commas, and the like. Maybe a little continuity work, if they happen to catch it, but that’s about all. The Weber problems you point out are more substantial in nature, something a genuine editor should address with the author before the manuscript is ever locked and sent to a copyeditor for the final polish.
Let me Google that for you.
To be honest, in the panel at Manticon where Toni Weisskopf talked about not editing David Weber’s work, I do not remember whether she said “copyediting” or “editing”. Either way, the gist was that David Weber is so popular amongst Baen readers, and that Weber had so many projects going on that he was terrible at sticking to deadlines, that Baen needed to do as little as possible after receiving his work to keep their schedules intact. I could be wrong, but I thought Weisskopf considered Weber to be the exception rather than the rule.
@David K. M. Klaus–
JJ is well known here, a long-time regular. She can be cranky sometimes–but so can you.
And you have been insisting on judging harshly our reactions to Larry Correia and our judgments of him and his behavior without bothering to acquaint yourself with that behavior.
His blog isn’t hard to find. You can go to the front page of File 770, and click the links to Puppy-grade blog entries, and items tagged as Correia-related, and get caught up that way. It’s not complicated, though it may be time-consuming.
In the meantime, though, no, we don’t need to await your permission, or need your approval, for knowledge gained and opinions formed from File 770 having become a major Puppy target in a struggle over the Hugos that lasted several years.
People might be more willing to help you understand what happened, if you had asked, instead of opening by telling us we were behaving badly while admitting you lacked large swaths of the information necessary to form a meaningful opnion.
Correia spent several years trying to hijack or destroy the Hugos because he was nominated for but didn’t win the Campbell, invited in the more toxic Vox Day, and spawned a campaign of destruction that outlived his interest in running it.
Hell, yes, he’s radioactive, and any con that has him as a guest will be making a choice they would be wise to understand in advance. It is going to have consequences for them because of all the damage Correia has done.
@ULTRAGOTHA: I so appreciate you making an evidence-based disagreement with me. I get so tired of assertion (even my own); you are doing just the opposite.
@Lis Carey
+1
@ Rev Bob
Too true! I am a copyeditor who often ends up intervening in structure, etc. (with client’s OK), but not for novels (yet! added hopefully).
@ Lis Carey
Spot on, as usual.
I’ve not actually read it, but read so much *about* it, that i’m left wondering: is Redshirts to Star Trek what Rosencrantz And Gildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet?
Redshirts is made by the three codas.
It is the second result for his name on Google. I know you must be frustrated to be getting criticized by a lot of people here at the same time — I’ve had that experience myself several times — but you cannot seriously be faulting people for not providing something that you could have so easily found.
You arrived describing yourself as a longtime friend of Mike Glyer. Do a search for both of their names together and read the things Correia wrote about him on his blog. They’re ugly as hell, and nothing Glyer ever said to him justified the torrent of abuse he received in return. All OGH ever did to him was link to and quote his blog on File 770 posts. How that became regarded as a grievous insult is a mystery to me, like a lot of things that make the puppies foam at the mouth.
@rochrist – sounds like I should read it. For reasons not entirely clear to.myself, I’ve not read any novels for a couple of years now. My curiosity was piqued when someone recently I think mentioned the inevitability of the Redshirts` fate and I was reminded of the coin-tossing scene in R&G and the wider theme of freewill Vs fate/narrative.
Lis, you wrote:
.
“Bolgeo’s zine, several issues of it, of his selection, were included in the Hugo packet the year he was nominated. It was not just one joke. One example did become emblematic, but there was in fact quite a bit of material of varying levels of offensiveness.”
.
Lis, even before Nila died money was always tight. After her death, it isn’t any better, as you can imagine. Worldcon memberships at the prices they are today are a luxury, and not things which fit in the household budget unless part of the rent, or a utility bill, or food, or some medicines are forgone for that month.
So I did not receive that packet.
I remember when MidAmeriCon I set the at-the-door membership price at $50 and there was loud weeping and gnashing of teeth over that huge price, which, it was said, would deny fans who didn’t know if they could attend until just before the convention the ability to attend at all.
When chiding me for not knowing things, URLs are very helpful in creating a remedy for that.
@rcade Pasting LC’s comments in context and linking to the original is offensive because, if only subconsciously, they know that what they are saying is largely nonsense and looks very bad if repeated outside their own echo-chamber, or subjected to fact-checking.
@robinareid made my point about TGE better than I- sure, there is character growth, and it is well done, but here isn’t a Quest. But that isn’t a problem, my thoughts about the author while reading it were largely in the order of ‘you are so clever, do more of this’ rather than taking issue with the lack of the Quest.
Now that I think of it, I *abhorred* ‘the show about nothing’, but had the exact opposite reaction here.
DKMK:
First, you do not speak for the fan community in any way. Second, social customs from another age and era usually have to be adjusted to fit modern times. Just look at the crash and burn of the Swedish Academy.
Personally, I will not visit a convention where Correia is GoH. It doesn’t make much impact, because I more or less only visit WorldCon. But others seem to think the same. It is up to the convention to decide if he is a lift or a downer.
Not up to persons who name themselves spokespersons for the whole fan community and speak about imaginary social customs.
Also, you start to talk abot people here as if we are all suffering from mental illness and you are the only sane person. Is that the way you want to go? Insulting everyone with a difference in opinion?
rcade:
I have met JJ. I know who they are. They are a regular here and even if we have our clashes, it is someone who does not “hide”. I haven’t met rcade (that I can remember?) , but I appreciate their comments and writings. They are people I have known for years since starting to read here. They carry much more weight than some random who mostly argues to let bigots be Guest of Honours.
Their comments have a place here. Do not try to invalidate them.
Hi all. Long thread.
I feel like I’m in a time warp and we are back in prime puppy slate season as I’m reading this thread. (Not)Trolls behaving as trolls and they are too old to know how to use (or maybe it’s care enough to) Google to learn anything. But BECAUSE they are cis white men and friends of OGH they know more than the current well informed commenters on OGHs fanzine blog. Nothing like treating your long-term buddy’s newer friends as a bunch of airheads without a clue to show your friend how much you respect him (like not at all). Why is it that so many cis white men are so insulting to their supposed friends as well as unable to do basic searches in Google and need to be hand fed information like a 3–year-old?
Royal Highness Iphinome wrote:
.
“‘And an attempt to address a stranger respectfully is taken as an insult by one, and would be (presumably) simply corrected by another.'”
“Don’t worry, you are free to, but in no way required to, address me as your royal highness.
“Iphinome works as well, not picky.”
.
‘Royal Highness’ is a title of a Prince or Princess in direct line for the throne, so I am grateful for the permission to be informal.
Dear David,
As a multiple-time GoH (and how many times have you been?) I can tell you that your notion that dis-inviting a GoH who was a bad fit diminishes the honor of being GoH is… bullcrap. Every single damned convention has far more good GoH candidates than they will ever have slots for. There are an awful lot of good GoH’s out there. Nobody who is a decent GoH thinks they are owed a slot at a particular convention… Or if they do they know enough not to say it publicly! They just hope their opportunity will pop up. And it’s just as much of an honor if it pops up this year or five years from now. Or if it pops up because another GoH had to drop out (that happens!) or they got disinvited. They’re not “second choice” — there are many more than one “first choice.”
On a practical level, if any particular convention started to make a habit of this, they would have a hard time attracting good GoH’s. Which is not to say some convention couldn’t go down that rabbit hole, fans being what they are, but they’d get what they deserve.
As for W______, you obviously don’t have any detailed knowledge of what went on around that. You’re flat out wrong in so many respects. Nor have you demonstrated you know much about Larry Correia. Or, for that matter, what the culture and psychology of being a GoH is.
What you seem to have as a whole bunch of opinions about how you imagine things are or should be that don’t have much connection with fact. This could happen, or that could happen, or that might happen. None of which things have happened.
Four dis-invites out of, what? 2000 conventions, maybe? That doesn’t exactly make it a common thing. If you’re worried about a slippery slope, we haven’t even tilted measurably off the horizontal. Your concerns are exaggerated and misplaced.
Why should we pay any more attention to what are demonstrably uninformed opinions conjuring up faux bogeymen?
And, not so by the way, ragging on someone you’re in a spat with about them not using their “real name” is way beyond unseemly. It just makes you sound a little jerky. Or someone who is 12 years old… to everybody else.
– pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]
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— Ctein’s Online Gallery. http://ctein.com
— Digital Restorations. http://photo-repair.com
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@David K. M. Klaus–
But those of us who were members of that Worldcon did receive that packet, and it played its role in forming our opinions.
And you have been berating us as if it were inappropriate of us to have formed opinions on the basis of more complete information than you had, and outrageous of us not to immediately admit we were wrong.
Or perhaps we were supposed to regurgitate every pixel of those months of discussion, reading, argument, and being attacked.
No. That particular piece wasn’t easily available to you, but much of the rest of it is, on this very blog, if you choose to use the tools provided.
And, heck, there’s likely discussion of that zine, with more information than you have right now, too.
Personally, I’m not giving Correia another link, since you can find it so easily.
The information was easily available on the net last time this was discussed here on File 770. Comments linked to an archive of the fanzine to show how easy it was to corroborate the existence of racist jokes.
But if people refuse to read the available information, wants to remain willfully ignorant, then there isn’t much to do.
@Ann Somerville- good analysis.
The Sad Puppy logic of what others should be giving them mirrors the ‘incel’ argument.
Word on Twitter today:
https://twitter.com/darrenwatts27/status/996856033606762496
Rail wrote:
.
“@David K. M. Klaus: That’s treading awfully close to the Geek Social Fallacies.
“And most times, schadenfreude is the only closure we’ll ever get.”
.
GSF? Perhaps, but it depends on which one you are implying.
This thread got sidetracked early on, and part of that is my fault for the way I first commented on it, in my anger that the rug would be cruelly pulled from under anyone because of mass trolling.
This isn’t about Larry Correia and has never been about Larry Correia, and that’s the sidetrack. What this is about is publicly praising a person by naming her/him as a Guest of Honor, then inverting that into a public condemnation because a mob came on with the electronic equivalent of torches and pitchforks. In this context, that’s what it is, a public condemnation.
Some Guests may belatedly deserve some level of condemnation. In example, Sad Puppies was completely wrong, motivated by an egregious error of perception, and conducted with anger at a shadow of reality rather than reality.
Some ex-guests don’t deserve condemnation, as with W_____ and the guest they treated so poorly because they discovered that she had been an officer in the U. S. Marine Corps and had Marine Corps values as well as fannish and feminist values. The W_____ mindset is unable to comprehend that the one is not incompatible with the other two, so they declared a popular writer with a following of fans of her work, one who had never intentionally or otherwise plunged all fandom into war, to be unclean and cast her out.
In my observation and experience, publicly expressed schadenfreude extends things rather than providing closure. YMMV, of course.
You seem hellbent on opening every existing wound, counting up every grievance you’ve had, starting up all discussions a new? Why is that?
You have already proven yourself seriously misinformed with the two earlier cases, why should we trust any version you give now?
Hampus Eckerman wrote:
.
“He, it can be kind of confusing with different cultures, right? In Sweden, we had an active policy of removing honorifics from speech. It started around the 60:s and was more or less done by the 70:s. Before that you used titles or formal “you” with regards to others. So when I hear a title, it irritates me, because it implies that my value system has a base in the 50:s and hasn’t developed much since then, implies that I am anti-egalitarian. Which of course can’t be easy for people from other countries to understand, especially when they think they are showing respect instead.
“So my apology if it came out as if I saw your comment as an insult. That was not my meaning and I should have expressed my dislike for titles in a better way.”
.
Hampus, your apology is gracious, and I gratefully accept it. I apologize to you for my ignorance of this particular custom of your country. What I do know of Sweden is entirely positive: you live in one of the best nations on the planet so far as I’m aware, and my Iate wife Nila and I long wished we could have had the pleasure of a visit.
Dear Hampus (and secondarily David),
David’s narrative at what went down with Wiscon (of let’s stop being coy, because he’s not going to let it lie) is false.
I could say ill-informed, but at this point his unwillingness to learn anything factual but simply invent “alternative facts” out of thin air to support his narrative, it makes me seriously doubt his good intentions.
He’s decided this is all just *WRONG* and he’s not going to get annoying reality get in the way of that. He’ll spout nonsense in the name of his belief.
pax / Ctein
Dear Mark,
My most favorite line from 2001 is,
“My god… it’s full of stoats…”
~~~~
Dear Vicki,
Oh dammit. I was waiting for David to hit me with the “brave words coming from someone hiding behind a false name” deflect. Because it would have been so funny!
And you gave it away.
faux outrage– how dare you tell people I am posting under my actual name! [vbg]
pax / whatshisface
Contrarius wrote:
“I have had people actually show up at my house unannounced and undesired on more than one occasion (and in more than one town, both before and after I moved from one to the other) because of using my real name/personal info online. So no, thank you, you don’t need to know it.”
.
Nor do I wish to. Pseudonyms I don’t have a problem with, as there are, oh, so many valid reasons to use one, including “I just want to.”
My anger is at someone hiding behind a pseudonym while being a bully. It’s one of the nastiest things in group electronic communication, going all the way back to the BBS days of the ’80s, through Usenet, e-mailing lists, and into places such as MySpace and LiveJournal before moving into the web services popular today.
Rev Bob wrote:
.
“Pot, meet kettle. Perhaps now you understand why those of us who are intimately familiar with the subject matter have so little patience for your insistence on voicing opinions without first educating yourself on the facts.”
.
My opinions were based on the facts as I knew them. I frequently change my opinions as I receive new facts. I apologize when I’ve made honest mistakes. I might wind up doing that here, and meaning it, depending on what more I read. Or not, depending on what more I read.
An intent to complain about an act became an gangbang because in this instance the complaint was about an act done to someone unpopular here, and down the merry road it went, when what I had tried to say but bungled was that Origins did something no convention committee should ever do short of subsequent violence, a subsequent credible threat of violence, recent violence uncovered too late, or a long record of violence uncovered too late.
As I said in another reply, in my upset at the idea, I initially wrote in a way which easily led to a sidetrack about Mr. Correia himself, when he was never really the issue for me — the issue for me truly has been about pulling the rug from under publicly announced guests — and going down that sidetrack has led to anger, bullying, defensiveness, patient explanations still without [citation needed], and more I’m not going to go further with.
Instead of yelling at me for being honest about not having read Larry Correia’s weblog in an effort to show I was a disinterested party, all anyone could have said was “You’re wrong about this aspect of the situation, read his weblog, it’s here: http://etc.”
My past experience with several search engines is that searching for particular weblogs has been an amazingly difficult task I’ve searched on Proper Names in the past for weblogs I was many times told were good to read and only came up with Wikipedia pages or a conversation thread somewhere else or dozens of spamvertisements for places which say they can provide locations, credit ratings, and criminal records for anyone for a price. Sometimes an old, no longer updated weblog on an abandoned platform but nothing current. It isn’t a problem for anyone (especially anyone angry) to just say “read here“, quickly cutting to the chase. Nobody’s done that, instead just throwing insults referencing Google and continuing to make things difficult.
David K. M. Klaus, your behavior here has been bullying. You demanded filers answer and do your research for to you while you couldn’t be bothered. You grabbed onto something and wouldn’t not let it go. You pushed and pushed.
Pushback is NOT bullying. It’s an appropriate response. You may feel bullied because you came crashing in like a bull in a china store and the store clerks (filiers) came running to deal with the disruption.
You continue to show your ignorance of how the internet works as well as about individual incidents. Both internet etiquette and details of the various incidents can be obtained by using the wacky and (not so) new search engine called Google. Google will even help you learn how to use it to perform searches to find the information you are looking for. You know what’s really amazing about using Google before opening ones mouth (or typing as the case may be)? One ends up looking knowledgeable instead of like an ignorant jerk. It’s absolutely amazing how learning internet etiquette AND to research BEFORE showing ones ignorance can improve the way others perceive one when one visits communities and blogs they haven’t visited before. Also reading a bunch of posts on said community and/or blog prior to jumping in and spouting off so one sees who is a regular and what the cultural norms are for the community helps one fit in on their first comment.
I know it is hard for many, many white cis men to take the time before opening their mouths thinking they are the first to ever think something but really it’s rarely true. By searching the community (Google can help) one can avoid looking foolish by saying something others who also didn’t educate themselves on had already said. Imagine NOT looking like just another foolish entitled jerk. That would be amazing… well to the community… and think about how much more you’d know and the better 1st impression you’d make.
Just a thought from a regullar lurker and semi-regular poster who dares to call herself a filer.
@Vombatus Rufus: My copy of “Clocktaur” came from the Big River, and therefore no stoats appeared. Anyway, I have a fondness for stoats since they were frequently mentioned on the late lamented “Cute Overload” website.
(Or should that be “Vombate” since I’m addressing you directly? Hmm… then there’s the gender to think of… must. not. fall. down. Wikihole…)
Conservatives aren’t bad writers. Look at all the Heinlein and Asimov works on the Retro Hugo ballot. Obviously hard-core Worldcon members still dig the dead white males of right-wing persuasion. Gene Wolfe is a master in not just SF but literature as a whole. Niven’s won bunches and people like him personally. Robert Silverberg has been to every Hugo ceremony ever, and spoken at all of them I’ve seen.
It’s just that the stuff Puppies gamed onto the ballot was terrible. All of it was badly written save one or two stories which were adequate but hardly award-worthy. Maybe if they’d put things on the ballot that were actually good (instead of selecting for political or PR/sales reasons), there would have been less outrage.
There are some quite decent works that get nominated for the Prometheus Award, many of which I enjoy. So conservatives and libertarians can write good, award-worthy stuff — the Puppies just didn’t slate any of it.
——————————————
Regarding the Benevolent Airships: I think the books in the US should go to public school libraries, since funding is being cut so drastically there. Particularly school districts that don’t have a big tax base. Like that one in the rural Sierras that everyone sent books to. Or schools in big non-gentrified cities.
@Soon Lee: That’s it. That’s the answer. Tachyon for first, Lightspeed for second.
@Rev Bob: I’ve seen worse proofreading, too, but I haven’t paid for it, in dead-tree. I don’t expect free Kindle books to be proofread. I do expect that when something shows up on the shelf at B&N, it’s had a least a going-over for spelling.
Thank you for the Amen. 🙂
@Cliff Ramshaw: That’s not a bad comparison. The free will/narrative and 4th wall stuff is definitely important in “Redshirts”. And the full title is “Redshirts: A Novel With Three Codas” for very good reasons.
David K. M. Klaus on May 16, 2018 at 2:34 am said:
There is a little thing called “Google” where you can plug in the words “Larry”, “Correia” and “blog” and–land sakes!–have the URL in a fraction of a second. I acknowledge that you may be hampered by using “weblog”, a word so antiquated that you are probably (with the possible exception of John C. Wright) the last person on Earth using it.
So I have a comment in moderation. All I can see that might have put it there is the name of a certain pretentious puppy who had a deep antipathy for The Legend of Korra. Is his name on the naughty list now?
@David J. M. Klaus–
What you’re missing is that the disinviting of Larry Correia is about Correia. It’s about his toxic behavior and years-long campaign to hijack or wreck the Hugos and the way he’s treated people who don’t agree with him.
It’s not about excluding people who don’t have the right views. It’s not about making and then rescinding a GoH invitation being a good thing. I think everyone agrees that it’s really unfortunate that this went down that way.
It’s about Correia being sufficiently toxic that trying to keep him as GoH would have been even worse.
Maybe you’ve missed the fact that one very important thing that happened in the short period (was it four hours?) between announcements is that in addition to attendees and fans in general, Origins was hearing from sponsors and exhibitors. They weren’t happy about being associated with Correia. I have no idea how strong a line they were taking, but they weren’t happy.
You will also get nowhere claiming JJ is bullying you. You came n very aggressively, insisting we were all wrong based on having far less knowledge of Corriea than most regulars here. You even went so far as to imply that a certain amount of pleasure in Correia getting the consequences of his past behavior is a sign of mental illness.
JJ in contrast has told you to see Google and the File 770 tools to educate yourself in the subject and stop talking nonsense. You’re a grown-up. That’s not too harsh. It’s not nearly as nasty as the suggestion of mental illness.
I’ll offer a reminder of the first rule of holes: Stop digging.