(1) 2015 Canadian Unity Fan Fund winner Paul Carreau is a council member of the Federation of Beer. Their latest officially-licensed Star Trek brew is Vulcan Ale.
Federation of Beer announces that Shmaltz Brewing Company of Clifton Park, NY is brewing a new Star Trek-themed beer called Vulcan Ale – The Genesis Effect, that will be made available on Planet Earth in early October. Under license by CBS Consumer Products, Vulcan Ale – The Genesis Effect will pay homage to the Star Trek franchise and its legacy, tying into the storyline of The Wrath of Khan as well as Shmaltz’s own brand of He’brew craft beers.
(2) Camestros Felapton uses photographic evidence to set the record straight in “Tentacled Victorians”.
Rumors that Queen Victoria herself was a squid monster where unfounded. Photographic evidence shows she was an octopus-monster not a squid monster.
(3) Amazon has filed suit against 1,114 fake reviewers who “sell fabricated comments to companies seeking to improve the appeal of their products,” according to the BBC. The lawsuit was filed Friday in Seattle.
The defendants, termed “John Does,” have offered their false review service for as little as $5 on the website Fiverr.com, according to Amazon. The sellers were avoiding getting caught by using different accounts from unique IP addresses.
However, Amazon was able to identify the fake reviewers by conducting an investigation and purchasing some of the fake reviews. Amazon is also working with Fiverr to resolve the issue.
“While small in number, these reviews can significantly undermine the trust that consumers and the vast majority of sellers and manufactures place in Amazon, which in turn tarnishes Amazon’s brand,” Amazon said in its complaint.
Vox Day suggests “More than a few SJWs should be shaking in their shoes” because – why wouldn’t he?
(4) Bri Lopez Donovan reports on the latest conrunners’ convention in “JOFCon 2015 Helps Build the Convention Community” on Twin Cities Geek.
I was fortunate to be a part of the “Disability Access” panel, which was actually more about accessibility in general rather than disability access in particular. I and my fellow panelists, Amanda Tempel and Rachel Kronick, started with brief self-introductions before jumping into the discussion by talking about some pitfalls and how they’ve been addressed in various conventions. One of the problems we talked about was the lack of gender-neutral bathrooms at CONvergence. Amanda mentioned how it had been a problem and a point of discussion for years, and how member engagement really pushed the initiative to create bathrooms that were accessible to those outside of the gender binary. The solution she spoke of was convention runners working with their venues to relabel or re-allocate resources, in this case to relabel the gendered bathrooms of a hotel to make them gender neutral for the duration of the convention.
Another issue tackled was the vetting of panelists. Audience members of this panel brought up the lack of diversity on panels that were covering topics of diversity—for example, no people of color on a panel about race in sci fi, or no folks with autism on a panel about spectrum disorders within geek media. Audience members and panels brainstormed various ways to address this, including vetting panelists by asking why they are interested in being on a particular panel and assessing their answers for issues that could arise.
(5) Kevin Trainor asks “SF Won The Culture Wars A Long Time Ago. Isn’t It Time Fandom Started Acting Like It? on Wombat Rampant.
Are you starting to see a pattern here? Is a trend becoming apparent to you? Here, let’s add another ingredient to this mulligan stew. In 1997, while I and my wife at the time were mostly busy trying to raise our kids, the regional SF convention in Minneapolis, Minicon, was in crisis. Attendance had ballooned to over three thousand people, staff turnover and burnout were epidemic, and the fan club nominally responsible for running Minicon, MNSTF, had no real idea whether the con was making money, losing money, or investing it in beaver hat futures on the Medicine Hat Commodities Exchange. The MNSTF Board of Directors, wakened from their dogmatic slumber by all the hooting, hollering, carrying-on, shrieks of horror, and assorted gibbering, actually paid serious attention to various proposals regarding the upcoming Minicon. One proposal, advanced by Minicon veteran Victor Raymond, was to split the baby: have one Minicon dedicated to traditional SF fandom, and another at a different time which would be more of a Gathering of the Clans, a three-ring circus and big ol’ party for media fans, anime fans, BDSM folk, and the other subcultures drawn to SF fandom, where being different wasn’t automatically considered bad. Another proposal, which was the one MNSTF wound up going with, was called the High Resolution Minicon Proposal, and whatever its authors’ original intentions, it was seen by most of Upper Midwest fandom as “Thanks for all the time and money you’ve sunk into Minicon over the years, you fringefans, but we’re tired of you now, and you need to fuck right off.” What became immediately apparent was that the vast majority of Minicon’s attendance and staff had in fact been made up of those “fringefans” for quite some time, and in the years following the implementation of the HRMP, Minicon’s attendance imploded to a low of about 400 people. Meanwhile, those fans who felt snubbed by the HRMP organized three other conventions: Marscon, more focused on media and gaming but still mainly an SF convention; Convergence, essentially Minicon 2.0; and Diversicon, which was ironically even more focused on traditional SF & fantasy but had split from Minicon over the issues of a “dry” consuite and open staff meetings, which Minicon had rejected. So in the end, what Victor had campaigned for happened anyway, but instead of successfully managing the change and remaining the preeminent SF club in the upper Midwest, MNSTF dropped the ball and dwindled into obscurity, which their graying membership seems quite happy with. The same thing, with minor variations, also happened at Boskone and Disclave and other regional conventions, so i think it’s reasonable to draw a few conclusions about SF fandom in general from these examples.
Let’s fast forward a few years. By now, everyone is familiar with the Sad Puppies story: Larry Correia noticed a drop in Worldcon attendance correlating with an increase in Hugo Awards to works of SF that weren’t terribly successful in the marketplace, but were written by the Right People and tended to have the Right Characters expressing the Right Views. Over the next two years, he tested the hypothesis, encouraging his readers and friends to join Worldcon and vote. Membership numbers at Worldcon increased, votes for the Hugo increased, and in the third year of Sad Puppies, when massive numbers of people bought supporting memberships and nominated works by John Wright, Tom Kratman, Michael Williamson, and other authors considered “badthinkers” by defenders of the existing order – the same people, mind you, who had encouraged Larry to go out and get more people to join Worldcon if he felt it wasn’t sufficiently reflective of the SF market- the backlash from people such as Patrick and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, John Scalzi, David Gerrold, and various unhousebroken employees of Tor Books was vitriolic. The Sad Puppies (and their co-belligerents, the Rabid Puppies led by Vox Day) were libeled as racists, homophobes, neo-Nazis, misogynists and pretty much every politically correct insult in the book. In the end, despite the Puppy Kickers’ hypocritical preaching against the evils of “slate voting”, a bloc of 2500 voters chose “No Award” over any work nominated from the Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies list – a list, mind you, that SP3 leader Brad Torgersen had not delivered from on high, but instead crowdsourced from anyone who wanted to suggest works worth nominating. Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies list was almost identical to the SP list, but as far as anyone knows, it was a list he chose and distributed to the Dread Ilk. This massive “No Award” result, which doubled the number of such from the last ten years, was loudly cheered and celebrated by those in attendance at the Hugo Award banquet; this cheering was encouraged by MC David Gerrold, while thousands of fans around the world were subjected to this display of vile behavior thanks to the Internet.
(6) Meantime, Kevin J. Maroney has his say, “Once More Around the Sun”, at New York Review of Science Fiction.
As I’m sure you know by now if you have even the faintest scintilla in the Hugo Awards, the “No Awards for Slates” option won out in this year’s Hugo final voting. This is the approach I advocated in my previous editorials, excluding the Puppy finalists not on grounds of quality or lack thereof, nor on the politics or personal foibles of the people running either of the Puppy slates. This was entirely a vote against the underhanded tactics that resulted in those finalists reaching the ballot. (The kindest thing that can be said about slate voting in this type of open-ended popular vote is that it is “technically not cheating.” That’s not a kind thing to say at all.) The people who were dragged onto the Puppy ballots without being consulted can be assured that this vote absolutely was not a personal rejection of you but of an unacceptable process.
There are larger issues involved in the Puppy movement that I don’t feel the need to rehash right now, issues of culture war, of reader communities and their protocols, of the powers and perils of our deeply interconnected communications. But at its core, the Puppy fight was about a group of people deciding to “not technically” cheat their way into an award and they were rebuffed, and that much, at least, is good. The Puppies will be back next year. It’s not particularly clear what they hope to accomplish in a fourth bite at the apple they claim is poisoned, but it will certainly be something.
(7) Today in History:
October 18, 1851 — Moby-Dick by Herman Melville was published. Much later, Ray Bradbury turned it into a script for John Huston.
October 18, 1976 — Burnt Offerings, from Dark Shadows‘ Dan Curtis, opens in theaters.
(8) The Superheroes in Gotham exhibit at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library will be open through February 21, 2016.
Superheroes in Gotham will tell the story of the birth of comic book superheroes in New York City; the leap of comic book superheroes from the page into radio, television, and film; the role of fandom, including the yearly mega event known as New York Comic Con; and the ways in which comic book superheroes, created in the late 1930s through the 1960s, have inspired and influenced the work of contemporary comic book artists, cartoonists, and painters in New York City.
Michael Powell reviews the exhibit for the New York Times.
The curators found in a private collection the Pow! Bam! Wham! Pop Art-era Batmobile and put it in the lobby. They mounted the Penguin’s umbrella and Catwoman’s hot unitard upstairs, along with Action Comics No. 1 (the first appearance of Superman) and art originals of the singular Steve Ditko’s Spider-Man.
The exhibition focuses on comic book founding fathers. They were predominantly Jewish kids — with a few Italians and the occasional wayward Protestant mixed in — from the Bronx, the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. And in the 1930s and ’40s, they created a world.
Bob Kane (born Robert Kahn), a creator of Batman, and Will Eisner, a son of Jewish immigrants and the creator of the Spirit, attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, as did the wisenheimer bard Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber), who created the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk and many more.
(9) Christopher Lloyd told The Hollywood Reporter he’d be glad to do Back to the Future: Part IV if somebody reunited the whole gang. “Doc” also says he’d like to toss out the first pitch if the Chicago Cubs get to the 2015 World Series, as predicted in Back to the Future: Part II.
(10) Book trailers by SFWA Members are collected here on YouTube.
(11) Brian Z. lays that pistol down in a comment on File 770.
Meet me in the thread, pixel, pixel
Puppies all around, pooping, pooping
Tear those puppies down, scrolling, scrolling
Droppings in the ground where flowers grow
Old familiar whine
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans
Shiny happy people laughing
Filers all around, love them, love them
Never make amends, dish it, dish it
There’s still time to cry, crappy, crappy
Save an unkind word for tomorrow’s whine
Old familiar whine
Shiny happy pixel-scrolling fans…
(12) J-Grizz scores one for the home team.
Pixel pixel little scrolls
God Stalk! Brackets, maybe trolls
Reading comprehension’s bad
Perhaps that’s why they are so sad
Pixel pixel little scroll
Filking’s just the way we roll
(13) Yipes.
I bought a $10 hat. Fear me. pic.twitter.com/BuKDNHiFQF
— Simon Bisson (@sbisson) October 18, 2015
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Camestros Felapton.]
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Ceci n’est pas une pixel.
Tenar Darell:
1988 was the year it moved to Springfield.
Not even that– a longtime Boston con-runner says:
Lydy, thanks for the Resolutionary perspective on the aftermath.
I think the one commonality between puppygate and the High Resolution Minicon was that organizers identified a problem, but didn’t understand the people.
Of course, with Minicon, almost everybody agreed there really was a problem, it’s just nobody agreed on the desired outcome. Puppygate is the opposite. Nobody agrees there is a problem, but puppy organizers keep agreeing on their solution even when it fails.
I do have one positive thing to say for Declan Finn: he appears to hate the sequoia subplot in Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears just as much as I did.
Cat : “Simon Bisson, that is an epic hat. I may not be fearing you but I’m certainly witnessing you. I don’t know where you laid hands on that for only $10 but you got a bargain!”
What Cat really meant to say was…
“Simon Bisson, dot iz an epic hat. Hy may not be fearink hyu bot Hy’m certainly vitnessink hyu. Hy don’t know vere hyu laid hunds on dot for only $10 bot hyu gots a bargain!”
1987 was the Boskone From Hell.
In 1988, we were in Springfield. In order to get the Springfield hotels, we had to agree to some specific restrictions that, when presented to the fannish public by a group that at the time had no one with any understanding of PR, pissed off an awful lot of fans who believed we were kicking them out for not being the kind of fans we wanted. That wasn’t true, but it took many years for that impression and the anger over it to fade to the level of no longer being a current problem.
Cat:
I believe what Cat was TRYING to say was:
TheYoungPretender: Having just googled Declan Finn, I’m almost hoping for some Puppy Democracy to put into play. The price for enough bourbon to get through last year’s packet was quite something; Finn’s work could make it prohibitive.
Nope, I’m done. The Puppies had their chance last year to prove their claim that excellent fiction was being missed in the Hugo nominations. If that were really true, they’d have nominated fantastic works. Instead the works ranged from unremarkable to mediocre to execrable, and I had to waste a huge amount of my precious reading time on their crap.
They had their chance. They blew it — in an EPIC way. I feel no obligation whatsoever to devote any further time to reading works nominated by Puppies at any point in the future, unless I freely choose to do so.
And I am certainly not going to be freely choosing to read any works by someone who’s putting out revenge porn drivel.
They had their chance, but they were hamstrung because the aim was to ensure that Brad’s mates got nominations, regardless of whether they’d written anything worth reading.
It is not impossible that Requires Hoyt and the Impala woman will come up with something more deserving from their process, but given that it appeals to people who read Requires Hoyt, I remain skeptical.
It’s going to be a while before Boskone 1987/88 isn’t the case study in how to not handle a crisis.
Unfortunately, it’s the object lesson people talk about but rarely seem to learn from.
“Ceci n’est pas une pixel.”
+1
Nicholas Whyte: thanks for your comments re my intervention at Trainor’s blog. I quickly worked out that the horse is dead so there is little point in flogging it. Note also copious comments from “mauser” (Richard Alan Chandler), a new name to me.
Why am I not surprised to find out that he is yet another self-published author who feels disadvantaged by the fact that people tend to nominate for Hugos works which are from publishing institutions?
RE: Confirmation bias, changing your mind
I really try to watch for confirmation bias, but it can be hard, as people have mentioned…fish…water…
I find I can change my mind about some things more easily than others. If I already made a mostly emotional decision and especially if I’ve proclaimed it publicly is when I find it very difficult to absorb new information and change my mind/position/declaration.
One weird thing is that I almost always feel better about myself if I concede a mistake, new info, etc and admit it. Even with that ‘reward’ it can be really painful to step onto the path that ends with “Hey, you’re right, I’m wrong.” Like most things, though, it gets easier with practice.
@Simon Bisson Why yes, I do have a big head 🙂 )
And an epically wonderful hat.
Did everyone who loved The Watchmaker of Filigree Street also love Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? The former has risen to the top of one of my mountains, but I have had a run of unfortunate book choices this week (the only book I’ve liked has “from Your Nine Liver Dwarves” as part of its title and isn’t fiction) and I can’t take another one.
Citing for magnificence:
https://file770.com/?p=25544&cpage=2#comment-355806
I don’t think they are similar at all, in tone or voice.
For the record, I never warmed to Jonathan Strange (the book) although I loved the TV series because the fact that it had a stellar cast made me care for the characters. Watchmaker, I cared for the character right from the start.
They are from two different periods – Watchmaker is late Victorian, rather than Napoleonic wars. Watchmaker is not so thick with backstory and lore, but it is much more graceful and humane, IMHO.
Yes, I have bought and given away two copies already.
Re: Confirmation bias and position changes
I’ve had to go through several position changes in my life, some of them fairly fundamental in nature. Looking back, I think there’s exactly one thing they’ve all had in common. Each time, I was faced with either changing a position I held or distrusting new information – either unimpeachable scholarship or work I’d personally done – that contradicted that position. Since I base my self-image on my ability to evaluate rather than on a specific position, changing my opinion was easier.
In the event that I’ve taken a public stance which I no longer agree with, all I can responsibly say is that, when confronted with new information, I would rather change my mind than knowingly embrace a delusion. At heart, I’m a scientist. That generally means I regard all statements of fact as if they had “unless proven otherwise” appended. 🙂
I think this is why it frustrates me to discuss issues with people who take the opposite approach. Not the opposite position – that’s fine. As long as they’re debating in good faith, and we’re both willing to say why we believe what we do, there’s the chance of learning from the exchange. With someone who makes their position a key part of their identity, though… not so much. That way lies bluster and outrage and blistering heat with the absence of light.
I think what happened to Minicon and Boskone had broad similarities; they grew beyond the ability of the groups running them to manage, and the result was chaos making things horrible for committee and staff, and fraying relations with the hotels.
Boskone kept trying to tweak things so they worked without making big changes, and the result was the Boskone From Hell and our getting blackballed at almost every possible facility in New England. I think our actual decisions after that point were reasonable, but I’m sure anyone who understands PR must wish had been thrown under a bus before we committed the PR disaster which was our attempts to communicate those decisions and the reasons for them.
Minicon, if I recall correctly, tried to avert the coming disaster with a plan to downsize to avoid it–and didn’t handle the communication side much, if at all, better than we did. I can only feel deep sympathy for everyone involved.
What he *actually* *said* during the awards ceremony was essentially Please don’t boo the Puppy nominees.
In other words, he “encouraged” “cheering” by asking people to be celebratory and not to be rude towards the Puppies.
That this act of compassion towards the Puppies has been twisted in their narrative into sneering insult is regrettably typical of their willful blindness.
I have locked myself out of Livejournal because none of my password remembering software remembers my LJ login. Ah, the passing of an age.
Since I was engaging in bear-baiting though, it’s probably better than way.
Fandom and PR are two things that in my experience that never ever will meet (hence my continual amusement by the Puppies saying “They must have sent out a press release”…).
As a journalist I have to work a lot with PR folk, and as much as we joke about them, the truth is that PR is hard, it’s not something that can be done by volunteers. It requires a continual relationship building exercise with your audience, so you can tailor releases and news appropriately. It needs a deep knowledge of journalists’ audiences to ensure the message gets sent out. I’ve been asked to do PR for people and every time I say no…
Oh, and Crisis PR? Those guys really earn the big bucks. And they deserve every penny.
@Simon Bisson That hat brightened my day! Made me smile every time it caught my eye.
And thank you also to whoever recommended Sanderson’s Emperor of Souls – I’m two-thirds of the way through. So far no 2015 novellas measure up. I liked de Bodard’s Citadel of Pearls, esp the world building, but didn’t get a great sense of her characters. I liked the characters in Penric’s Demon, but have to agree with ?? that it’s a bit bland.
Anyway, since I’m in Toronto, I was planning to divide my time tonight between the ball game and election coverage, but now my son wants to watch Fargo and that does sound more attractive – I’ll probably switch back and forth.
Thanks for the reminder as it gave me the push to post the update that has been sitting on the machine for awhile 🙂 – and thanks for people who have made suggestions and pointed out errors.
As for neutrality – the Puppies made neutrality impossible e.g. when linking to a post is regarded as an aggressive act (e.g. the various and multiple vilifications directed at our host for the round-up posts).
The Puppies took the Anakin Bush line of ‘If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy.’ but as Obi Wan Kenobi memorably replied ‘Only the Sith, Puppies and Math Teachers deal in absolutes. That other guy was dealing Absolut which is something else altogether.’
@ Bethz – The legendary Disclave flood has long been one of my favorite anecdotes in fannish history.
@ Harold Osler:
It was impressive. I give it a 9. The poster failed to work in some key Puppy rants and acronyms, which eliminates the possibility of a perfect 10 score, but it was a plucky and bold leap across rationality and reality, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of this frisky canine during the MidAmericCon rants (where the NHs will be GoHs, so stay tuned for Puppy fireworks!).
@RDF
Yes. Yes, that was what I was trying to say. Thank you.
My memory of the awards ceremony is that after one of the No Award results some booing crept into the cheering. My interpretation (and I think Gerrold’s) was that people were booing the Puppies. Gerrold said “Cheering is acceptable. Booing is not.” The crowd went back to cheering after that and I thought it was very classy, given the way a number of the Puppies had treated Gerrold, and I felt better about it too.
Later I found out that at least some of the booing was Puppies booing the majority of the Hugo Voters, and I guess some of the Puppies assumed that Gerrold knew that and was telling them to shut up and like it.
I think part of it was Gerrold didn’t want to single out the Puppies by saying “Okay people, let’s not boo the Puppies; that makes us look bad.”
I would like to say on behalf of the MInicon HRC that we studied the Boskone communique carefully, and made a completely different set of mistakes. With hindsight, I can see many ways in which we handled it badly, but cannot see a way to have handled it well.
Someone said earlier that there was the fact that there was a problem was generally understood. This is not correct. Very few people thought there was a serious problem, and many people, including many of the people doing the gruntwork, thought it was going fine, just a couple of bobbles. They were, in my estimation, completely incorrect. And a huge number of the attendees didn’t think there was a problem at all, the convention was working fine for them. Again, in hindsight I see a lot of the ways in which we made mistakes, but there’s no clear path that we could have taken.
@ Beth in MA:
I started out as a romance writer (14 novels w/a Laura Leone), and since I had never been a romance reader, the first 2-3 years I was writing, I read about 200 romance novels to get know my genre well. And now that I was evaluating books analytically, rather than just finishing the ones I liked and tossing the ones I didn’t, I discovered that it soon became very easy to list the specific reasons I thought a book was bad, but often difficult to be specific about why I thought a book was good or great–and the better a book was, the harder I found it to specify why I thought it was so good. I learned to do so, but I think it is indeed harder than saying why you think a book is bad or why you don’t like a book. So one of the things this taught me was that in a really good book, a lot of the seams are hidden from view, so to speak.
@rdf @cat (or should that be Krazy Kat?)
I speak Coconino too!
Laura Resnick: If you don’t mind my asking, why did you decide to start writing in a genre you didn’t read? I understand why an established writer might want to diversify into other genres, and pick one for, say, financial reasons or as a challenge to expand their range, but somehow starting off doing so seems a bit different somehow. (I’m hoping this isn’t coming across as rude, but I’m finding it hard to phrase in a way that’s less likely to be read as such).
@JJ
That’s my feeling too. I feel like my only real obligation now is to make sure that I don’t skip decent stuff that would have gotten nominated anyway — since there is a chance some of that could show up on the puppy lists. But it’s probably pretty easy to spot that stuff, because it will have buzz going in, it won’t be “what is this story/author I’ve never heard of doing on the Hugo ballot?”
@Lis Carey
My impression is that Norwescon had a similar issue — which caused them to be in Tacoma for a few years, before they returned to their old home at SeaTac. There might be Norwescon insiders on this list who would have more details, but the rumor mill at the time had it being the result of underage partiers, not necessarily convention guests, who did things like trash hotel rooms and get arrested for minor-in-possession.
@ Aaron:
You say that as if there is any Puppy credibility to discredit.
Did I miss something?
@ Will R:
Maybe a hive of sc and villa?
Given the omens so far it seems improbable that we will be able to work our way through next year’s Hugo packet without the assistance of alcohol to dull the pain, so I am providing advanced warning about gin; after all, now and forever gin is inextricably linked to SF.
I had one Hendricks, with the mandatory cucumber, after dinner and three hours later I have a headache; this could be pure coincidence but, in the interests of my future sanity, I have decided to take Hendricks off my list of rescue meds. Of course Simon’s hat could be the real culprit…
Finished The Traitor Baru Cormorant.
It’s a rare book whose ending actually leaves me feeling nauseated.
I … think that’s a compliment?
@Stevie
Thank you most kindly.
@Kyra
But is it actually a recommendation?
@Peace is My Middle Name
Touched, and flattered. Thank you.
@Lis Carey
There’s perhaps one difference between Boskone and Minicon: Minicon, and indeed _several_ of its successors, have all almost always been at the same airport hotel. There’s something of a tradition of making a portmanteau of its various chain names. To more than a few Twin Cities nerds, say the Radishtree (Raddison, Sheraton, Doubletree) and they’ll know what you are talking about. It has a spectacular set of pool cabana rooms, which are usually repurposed to some really spectacular parties at CVG and the other local conventions.
The reason I mention this, and why I remembered tales of the Minicon split when the Puppies started lifting their legs, is that we can’t make the gatekeeping tendencies of fandom solely the Puppies’ cross. I know a good number of the people who felt that Minicon wanted them and their awful devil music off their lawn; describing them as “not real fans” does a Torgerson-level of violence to the English language. Now, they may have liked to drink while discussing their nerdery, some may have experimented with the lighter illegal drugs, and, *horrors,* some of them may have regarded anime and the Renaissance Festival as fannish as well. (Bunch of them have still dropped by Minicon since; they felt excluded, not vengeful.) But hard to say they weren’t real fans, hard indeed.
Point being, gatekeeping is still a thing, even if the Puppies got No Awarded into the ground, and even if their current trends point either to take over by Vox Day or Declan Finn. Fandom has a long and ugly history of treating science fiction as some sort of limited resource, where too many people coming to the genre means there’ll be less of it for each of us. Much as I love CVG, there’s still the occasional round of pearl clutching about the youth and their loud music; they are _always_ just louts who aren’t “real” fans, etc. Meanwhile, some of the youth will be the next round of ConComm, and have written novels by their 17th birthday, really get the webcomics, etc. The beat goes on.
Confirmation bias just ain’t the puppies, may be what I am saying.
This has been bugging me for awhile so while the topic of fish and stuff is in people’s minds, I’d like to say that I’m not okay with “Requires Hoyt” as a nickname for the Exile. I’m broadly okay with giving Puppies nicknames, and I consider Hoyt herself a ridiculous person, based on her voluminous ranting, and an unpleasant one too.
But “Requires Hoyt” as a sobriquet links her to a person with a record of sustained, targeted viciousness; someone who, on the testimony of her victims, has done her best to ruin specific lives with malice aforethought. That’s far beyond Hoyt’s naptime reveries of bygone falangism. I may never make “Hoyt13” – my preferred alternative – happen. But I’d like it if people dropped the “Requires Hoyt” one way or the other.
You say that as if there is any Puppy credibility to discredit.
I’m sure there is someone out there who has never heard of them.
I may never make “Hoyt13” – my preferred alternative – happen. But I’d like it if people dropped the “Requires Hoyt” one way or the other.
I think that at this point, the worst insult one could come up with for the Pups is to simply use their actual names. They’ve made themselves into such a toxic property that correctly identifying them as Hoyt, Torgersen, Correia, and so on is the most damning label one can apply to them.
I’m not giving up “Kate the Impala,” Aaron.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan,
Can you not get LJ to reset your password?
RE: Hugo ceremony cheering/booing.
I think what the MCs did was a kindness to the Sad Puppies & Rabid Puppies: both what Tananarive Due did when she asked for applause to be held until all finalists had been announced for each award, and Gerrold for the admonishment that cheering was appropriate, booing was not.
ETA: @Jim Henley, I for one prefer to avoid nicknames unless they are self-given. There can be a dehumanising component to them I prefer to avoid.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
The last time you gave a gushing rec it worked out rather well for me, so… *nudges book up to the summit of Mount File770*
@Laura Resnick
Your whole comment was good but I wanted to pull out this line:
That’s a lovely way of putting it. 🙂
@McJulie
I’m fairly sure that if they end up nominating something that’s truly knock-out someone here – probably several someones – will be sufficiently loud about loving it that no-one will miss at least giving it a go.
@Stevie
I plan on sticking to booze I actually like, or at least a reward system based on fresh fruit. I like fruit. 🙂 No-one can feel sad about Puppies after biting into a nice crisp juicy apple – at least no-one who likes apples.
@Jim Henley
I sometimes indulge in petty acronyms (VD and BS mostly). I’ve been trying to cut down on those, though. I can make my points just as well – probably better – without them.
@Soon Lee
I agree, I thought the request to keep applause for the end of the nominee list was very thoughtful. I think its a shame that most Puppies would rather focus on slights real or imagined than appreciate moments like that.
One of the reason why a book can be labeled as bad is you can point at the mistakes made. That is the easy part. I remember from reading The Goblin Emporer there was only one time I was brought out of the book for a craft error and that goes a long way to being why I liked it.
An okay book can lack the flaws that pulls a reader out of the story, but tends to be forgettable. A good book lacks the same flaws but stays in the memory. There is no craft errors to point to for both which makes critiquing a more nebulous task, and as is being shown by the differing opinions here about various stories, somewhat dependent on taste.
Just my two cents.
Soon Lee on October 19, 2015 at 5:42 pm said
Yeah, I’m a good liberal, and all that, so I prefer to address people by the name they choose for themselves.
My major exception to this policy comes from my acquaintance with a local street person who was usually named ‘Michael’. At low points of his cycle, however, he would become convinced that he was REALLY ‘Michael the Archangel’, and he would tell you that’s how he wanted to be addressed.
(At the bottom of his cycle, not only was he convinced that HE was Michael the Archangel – but he would also be convinced that YOU were Satan….)
Michael was a colorful local figure – and the people who encountered him regularly usually came to a consensus that indulging him in his religious delusions did him no favors at all. (Sometimes not encouraging religious delusions is a greater politeness than addressing someone by their ‘preferred’ handle.)
So – despite his occasional expressed preference, I always called him ‘Michael’, as I didn’t buy into – or want to encourage – his religious delusions.
Which is a long-winded explanation for why – when I must mention him – I refer to Beale by his real name.
‘As You Know’ Bob,
::fist bump::
I too refer to him as “Theodore Beale” ( I roll my eyes in the general direction of the “Vox Day” moniker.)
JJ on October 19, 2015 at 1:52 pm said:
… “I already know that it will be a struggle to force myself to read The Dark Forest — in fact, I’m quite sure that the list of 2015 books I actually want to read is so long that I won’t get to it before nominations.”
I read this as your list of 2,015 books, and I was (briefly) awed that you were sufficiently organized that you actually knew the number of works in your TBR pile.
Normally I hold back on stuff like this, but since it was seconded and because, for some reason totally incomprehensible even to me, I care:
un pixel.
I pointedly will not refer to Mr. Beale by his overweening moniker. To try and pun and call yourself the voice of God is, I’d think, *impious*. But what do I know, being a lapsed Catholic?
I do admit to being childish enough to often call him “Super Genius Theodore Beale “to allude to his insistence on his “+2 sigma intelligence” and spin it in a Wile E Coyote direction.
I should try and curb that tendency of mine.
I watched the Minicon Meltdown from the outside, not as a MnSTF member, or a Minicon committee member, but as someone in the no man’s land between general attendee and conrunner, with an above-average investment in the convention but not actually being of it.
Minicon had problems that needed to be solved. Not a Boskone-level “we’ve been kicked out!” crisis, but problems.
I think there was a lot of “can’t see the forest for the trees” going on with people who were too close to the problems. The finances were a shambles, and that was clear to anyone who paid attention. Staff burnout (and procrastination that made it worse) was pandemic. The relationship with the hotel was strained.
But denial goes a long way when you love something. It’s easy to ignore or at least minimize other problems when you’ve got your own fire to fight.
And some of the problems were being fixed. Departments that ran late and way over budget for years prior ran on time and in the black at Minicon 33. Friends of mine had taken them over, and shared the history with me. They were very proud to have succeeded where their predecessors had failed.
Some problems weren’t fixed (the perpetual party room confirmation delays).
So more had to be done. I thought the “what does this have to do with science fiction?” question was a great core principle for refocusing the convention.
But I watched activities I loved being cut. Not random things that were questionably science fictional. Activities that were at the heart of my fanac, activities with a storied history in fandom (and not just Minicon “fandom”). I talked with friends on the high resolution committee, and heard rationale that didn’t make sense to me, rationale that didn’t have anything to do with the idea of a high resolution focus.
I explicitly said “This sounds like you don’t want people like me here.”
And I heard answers like “well, yeah, we don’t want that kind of thing here, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t want you here.”
And I heard excuses like “but we’re sacrificing one of my sacred cows too!”
That’s what it looked like from the outside. Random amputation without a clear vision everyone agreed upon. Only “Minicon needs fixing, and drastic action is required! We must first make it smaller!”
It may have been different mistakes than Boskone, but it was a shining new path to the same result. I chose not to go to Minicon 34, and through a bit of luck, went to Eastercon instead.
Oh, I don’t know about that. I have been playing a game with the Puppy leaders – “Which Fox News/Tea Party/Conservative are you?” I have been having trouble deciding if Sarah Hoyt should be put down as Ann Coulter or Michele Bachmann