47 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/11/23 Pixelmancer”

1. (2) I’d recommend to them that they read the discussions here about site selection.

2. (1) I’m shaking my head. She gets a contract with a major – I wouldn’t kill, but I’d be on my knees to get one… and she pulls this insanely stupid crap.
   (3) And if it had worked, it would have been time for those rocket’s red glare coming at him.
   (6) Interesting to see how the youngsters understood it. As if it’s… I dunno. Maybe like when I used to visit the Steel Pier as a kid, and sit in all the new cars every year, rather than a literature of possibilities and dreams.

3. @P J Evans (2) Indeed. Discussion here was lively, sometimes heated, and I don’t think the drift of it was in China’s favor. Also, people could have gone, and had reasons to go, stayed away.

   Nor was this the only place there was heated discussion and vocal opposition.

   Unfortunately, Chengdu won the vote, and we don’t have procedure to disqualify a candidate on human rights grounds before the vote. Or after it, of course, but I’m not sure after the would be workable at all.

4. (1) This was not unexpected after all that had happened. I wish more publishers could be proactive. I wish Goodreads/Amazon would be more proactive about preventing review bombing — especially against POC and queer writers.

   According to Xiran Jay Zhao, this could have all been resolved privately — long before they first mentioned it on Twitter.

   Some people have said that publishers and agencies should start educating their authors on how to use social media. But do you really need to see a tutorial to know you shouldn’t hurt and betray your fellow authors?

   (3) I would not have gotten into that contraption!

   With a helicopter, the Confederacy could have lost by land, sea, and air.

5. (1) I was gobsmacked when I first read about it. What on earth were they thinking that this was in any way a clever way to promote your book? That it wouldn’t have got out? That there were not going to be consequences? Clearly they have F*’d Around, and now they have Found Out.

6. 2) If such a “human rights” exception were to be enacted, it would be used to attack people’s pet disfavored nations. For certain an Israeli bid would be attacked this way. You would then have the same people looking to ban individual states in America as well.

   If more people vote for a site, the site gets to host Worldcon. The people who object to that site don’t have to go.

7. @ Anne Marble
   Nobody should need such a tutorial. If one doesn’t want to behave well for the principle of the thing, one might consider the consequences of getting caught.

8. 1) People who think they are clever are often the dumbest. Good that shes dropped. Although I predict its a matter of time, before she will draw the “cancel culture” card (and people who conviently forget the past as soon as it happens, will jump on that bandwagon. You know who they are)

   You know Pixelsdasher and Pixeldancer
   And Pixelprancer and Pixelvixen,
   Pixelcomet and Pixelcupid
   And Pixeldonner and Pixelblitzen.
   But do you recall
   The most famous scroll title of all?
   Godstalk the click-boxed title
   Had a very shiny scroll
   And if you ever saw it
   You would even feed the troll
   All of the other titles
   Used to laugh and scroll its names
   They never let poor Godstalk
   Play in any wordle games

   Then one foggy Christmas Eve
   Mike came to say,
   “Jetpacks not working,
   Won’t you scroll my File tonight?”

   Then all the Filers loved it
   And they shouted it out with glee,
   “Godstalk as a scroll title
   will go down in history!”

   With apologies to … everyone I guess.

9. @Peer: Excellent!

   (1) They’ve spelled her name right, but it’s still bad publicity.

10. (2) Unless we can find an objective way to evaluate a country’s human rights record that we could put in the constitution, we might have to accept that as fandom expands to include more fans from countries with different views about what human rights should be protected, there may be more Worldcons held in countries where various fans may be or feel unsafe (and this could include some of the traditional host countries – I would expect many foreign fans might have qualms about attending a US Worldcon under a hypothetical Trump II administration).

    Prior to Chengdu, I was thinking that we could perhaps try to boost the resources given to virtual attendees in future Worldcons, including reworking the business meeting to allow remote participation, so that people could participate from the safety of their home countries any time Worldcon was held in a country where they felt unsafe attending physically. That may still be a future priority we should continue to work on. But the virtual program at Chengdu was such a CF that I’m unsure if we can really count on this to be a viable solution.

11. Does the pixelmancer show up in Naomi Novik’s Scrollomance books?

12. (2) Last I checked, Tel Aviv was still the only bidder for the 2027 Worldcon; I look forward to seeing how many of the people who were opposed to Chengdu will feel the same way about that bid, and for those who don’t, how they’ll justify it.

    (3) Considering how dangerous early aviation was in general, and how dangerous helicopters are in particular, it’s kind of a shame they didn’t get something working, as it would have meant at least a few more dead Confederates.

13. Pixelmancers must show up in the Jim Hines Libriomancer novels, right? 🙂

14. I would be willing to submit a by law to the Worldcon Constitution that would say something such as this “All Worldcon sites must be in countries that respect human rights. For nations that have a number of divisions such as the US or Canada that can make their own laws, these would apply to sites in those divisions. The criteria would be base on agreement from two or more recognized human rights organizations. Examples would be Human Rights Watch or Freedom House. The score must be above average at least.”
    This is vague and I hope that people with more knowledge about how those indexes work would come closer to a reasonable way of judging a country. I also understand that segments of the USA would not pass muster and that is why I included divisions of a country. For example, in the US, one could argue that Washington State is a decent place to have a Worldcon and Florida may not be. (I had a friend who did not attend a useful professional conference in Florida because she is transgender)

15. (1)
    More allegations on CC have come up on Bluesky (and I’m not entirely sure that this is reasonable to those not in Bluesky, and if not, and you want one, i have invited)
    https://bsky.app/profile/tessfowler.bsky.social/post/3kgddffq32v2a

16. @Linda
    This sounds complicated and risks partisanship. Just thinking about the specifics of Israel, there are lots of people and organisations who’ll happily point out that Israel is the only functioning democracy in the middle East, that is army is the most moral in the world, that it’s position on LGBTQ rights is exemplary and so on.
    There are also those who cite apartheid, ethnic cleansing, second class citizens and so on. Who should WSFS believe? Should it become the fandom wing of Amnesty International?

17. @Nickpheas
    Wow! That was … something else.

    BTW I have some Bluesky invites, too. 🙂

18. So, who’s up for Chinese food tonight?

    Seriously, what’s to prevent North Korea or Russia from entering a bid for the Worldcon? Nothing, alas…

19. @Andrew (not Werdna) Thank you!

20. Well, except that Israel is not really a functioning Democracy, since it effectively rules over and controls the populations of Gaza and the West Bank, while engaging in legalistic sleights of hand to deny these people representation. Look, you can’t have it both ways, and you can’t play games.

    There’s also the reality that Iran and Lebanon are also functioning, albeit flawed democracies, and excluding them is legalistic sleights of hand and gamesmanship.

    As for the ‘most moral army in the world’ that’s rather ridiculous and untenable. How many civilians has the most moral army in the world killed in the latest Gaza war? How moral was the Israeli army in its occupation of Lebanon? How moral is the Israeli army as an occupation force in the West Bank.

    Perhaps we should stop listening to moral posturing by Israel and Palestinians and just look at what each side actually does, and hold them accountable for their actual actions. No more of this ‘he started it’ nonsense. If you bomb civilians, you’ve bombed civilians – no excuses, no justifications, just accountability.

21. The Cait Corrain thing makes my head hurt. There’s a level of lunatic malice and inspired pettyness there that I find monstrously inexplicable. This is one of those things that makes me think “If this is what you people are, I want nothing to do with you all.”

22. Can someone summarize the Bluesky material? I didn’t do Twitter, so I’m not interested in Bluesky codes, thank you.

23. @Nancy
    A Bluesky poster said she had been doing similar … uhm, stuff … in fandom, such as Critical Roll and Geek and Sundry fandom. She would have to put down everyone else — and eventually got banned. One example given was that at a public event, she played the “Who are you?” stunt on the poster even though they were frequently texting each other.

24. @ Jake
    “as it would have meant at least a few more dead Confederates.”

    That sounds very much like “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

25. Elon Musk made the mistake of calling his cool new Chat-toy Grok – and the thing has been as woke as hell since then. Paging Dr. Fronkensteen https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/12/10/elon-musks-grok-twitter-ai-is-actually-woke-hilarity-ensues/amp/

    No word on whether he’ll be suing himself for damages.

26. @Anne
    Thank you. That’s really not a good look, is it.

27. a) Given the ethnic cleansing going on in Gaza, and the treatment of the Palestinian residents of the West Bank the way the US treated Native Americans, there is zero chance I would to a 2027 Worldcon in Israel.
    b) Dave Wallace – I mentioned that to Ben Yalow, after the Sat business meeting in Chicago, and he dismissed it, “what, you want a thousand people to show up at the business meeting?” Which, as far as I’m concerned, is horse hockey. A large US Worldcon in Chicago… and 88 people showed up for the session I was at? Really? Thousands of people sitting through that?

    Ben and the Smofs like control, IMO.

    c) Bil – You’re comparing Native Americans and how they were treated, to literal slavers? Yes, more of the latter should have been executed.

28. @bill–

    @ Jake
    “as it would have meant at least a few more dead Confederates.”

    That sounds very much like “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

    The Indians were all either just living their lives, or defending their territory against the invading US settlers and armed forces.

    So no, it’s not equivalent to “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” At all.

    The Confederates were traitors, in armed rebellion against the USA in defense of the continued enslavement of black Americans. In defense of the “right” to treat some human beings as literal chattel property. Yes, basically, the only good Confederate was a dead Confederate.

    Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

29. @bill: Being a Confederate, like being a Nazi, was a choice.

30. (1) The bottom keeps falling… It hit the Washington Post. This might be a gift link.

    Del Rey has also stated that they will not publish the book “or any other works on that contract. (It looked like it had been rescheduled for 2027, but that date was probably a placeholder so they could update their schedule, etc.)

31. Pingback: Pixel Scroll 12/12/23 Dancing With Pixels In Our Scrolls - File 770

32. Mark:

    In 2015, we had to relocate the (in person only) WSFS Business meeting from the room we initially wanted (the conference theatre, which is a great room) because it was clear that (thanks to the Puppies) we would need more seats. Programming and Facilities had to deal with the complication of moving an air-wall and reconfiguring a room twice a day (the cost of which was paid by all those extra memberships, so thanks to the Puppies again, I guess). We had possibly as many as 300 attendees at peak. But I had plans for what we’d have to do if we had overflowed that room’s 400-person capacity, because I took the approach that the WSFS Business Meeting is the only program item constitutionally mandated (remember, Worldcons aren’t required to hold a Hugo Award ceremony), so we simply could not turn away any attending member who wanted to attend.

    But managing large in-person meetings is a known issue. Something I’ve observed is that all in-person meetings and all-online meetings are manageable. A hybrid meeting, with a bunch of people in person and a potentially even larger group online, is not in something with which WSFS has experience managing. And remember that this isn’t a bunch of people passively watching a panel discussion. The folks on the head table aren’t the panelists. Every single attendee has equal rights of participation.

    Now you dismiss the idea that we’d get 500 plus people showing up online, all of whom would demand the right to speak, and who might just have the votes to force it. I think we could quite easily get that, and I frankly don’t know how to manage it.

    There are, in my opinion, a bunch of people who want remote participation at the Business Meeting who all individually think that the only additional people who will show up are themselves.

    If there is really this much demand to participate, I suggest that trying to run things as a town meeting really isn’t going to work (it doesn’t work that well right now, I’ll freely admit), and it’s time to move to an elected representative form of government, with the entire membership voting to elect a manageably-sized legislature, and with changed to the Constitution submitted to a vote of all of the members of the following Worldcon.

    It’s not about “control” in the form of defining what the meeting decides, but “management” in that mass meetings above a certain size become unmanageable. The largest WSFS Business Meeting that I recall attending was 1994 in Winnipeg, when roughly 10% of the eligible attendees actually attended (more typically we get around 3% of the eligible members). I think you highly under-estimate how many people would show up online.

33. @bill Nearly 90% of the Confederate army (per wiki, and not including slaves) were volunteers, and of the rest given the widespread desertion and dodging (again per wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Conscription_Acts_1862–1864) I’m not sure how badly they wanted out.

    And many of those “poor dirt farmers” supported the Union, and acted on it.

34. Kevin Standlee: The Business Meeting culture has been honed to discourage discussion and participation. It begins with setting the debate time for amendments to trivial numbers of minutes. And then it’s very difficult to get recognized to speak. The last BM I attended — that one you describe in 2015 — I was never able to be the first person on their feet after the previous speaker finished. I was never called on. I don’t blame you for the Business Meeting’s culture, but it is a sophisticated game with serious obstacles to participation.

35. Bill: I understand your tactic for “winning” the argument. You need to understand that I’m not hosting it.

36. When I was at Pemmicon at the Seattle bid table, I had someone come up and say they couldn’t go to our Worldcon because they were trans and didn’t feel safe in America. I said, “I am so sorry that is your experience.” And honestly, they are correct. Is it as egregious as a place where (for example), by law, homosexuality is punishable by death? No. Does that mean it’s necessarily safe? Sadly, no. So it’s a morass one way or the other. But I do there needs to be a line in the sand.

    Also the visitors in Chengdu were told they wouldn’t get in trouble if they lipped off, the convention runners would. Subtle and terrible difference.

37. Mike:

    I understand your position. But what would you propose? Allow anyone who wants to speak to a motion to speak for up to ten minutes? (That’s the default in Robert’s Rules.) Have no debate limits at all? We could then have a Business Meeting that never accomplishes anything at all, because we’d run out of convention before anything ever came to a vote, given that people would just keep talking to prevent anything from being voted upon.

    This is why I say that the system we have now doesn’t work, and attempts to make the WSFS Town Meeting larger will make it work even worse. I’ve also heard people say that WSFS should not hold its annual meeting at Worldcon, but completely online, with no limits whatsoever, so anyone who wants to speak can hold the floor and talk as long as they want, forever. This seems like a bad idea to me, but what do I know?

    Oh, and the “hold it online so that real fans can participate” argument limits participation in a different way that “hold it only where members can physically attend” does. I suspect, however, that most of the people reading this don’t think that the online-only limitation is a real limit, since people who don’t have a computer and fast internet aren’t Real Human Beings and aren’t worthy of consideration.

38. Kevin Standlee: While I said I didn’t blame you for the Worldcon Business Meeting culture, it’s clear from your attempt here to focus only on extreme alternatives that you don’t want any solutions that might change it either.

    I hope you’ve already realized the Worldcon is just a couple years away from becoming another zombie con like Westercon.

39. 1) She’s going to have to change her name, write a completely different book in a completely different genre and wear a disguise at book signings if she wants any kind of a career going forward. Or write dinosaur porn for KU, I hear there’s good money in that.

    2) WSFS isn’t going to unring that bell and they probably should have thought of that but since they didn’t, they’ll need to make their peace with it. Now whenever somebody says that Worldcon shouldn’t go to Eastern Pongo-Pongo or Humpetyland or Latveria or wherever because of human rights or general badthink or whateverhefuck, I guarantee you that someone will pop up and say something along the lines of ‘why not, y’all had no problem going to China.’ and they’ll be right.

    3) They had submarines, so a helicopter isn’t that far fetched an idea. Even if they had gotten it working (a big ‘if’) it more than likely wouldn’t made a difference considering the multitude of liabilities the CSA was already laboring under.

    6) Children waving flags is almost as essential a part of totalitarian society PR as Potemkin villages and hiding the gulags are.

40. (2) In fact quite a lot of WorldCon fandom had a problem with it. But Chengdu won the vote, and it isn’t necessary for China to have rigged the vote for that to have happened. Possible, definitely, but not necessary and not provable. And WSFS doesn’t currently have any means to exclude totalitarian regimes or locations unacceptable for humanitarian reasons, because it has never seemed necessary before. Like the Puppies, it’s a gap in the rules no one recognized needed to be fixed.

    And, Quatermain, like plugging the loophole the Puppies exploited, there’s no hypocrisy in fixing it, no matter what certain motivated idiots will try to claim.

41. Some of the comments about possibly allowing remote participation in the business meeting (on this, as well as many previous discussions) sound to me like a very good example of the “perfect is the enemy of good” saying.

    The way the discussion (well, some arguments) goes seems to always be: everybody needs an equal opportunity to speak ? managing a hybrid meeting becomes untenable because we could have a thousand persons demanding to speak ? we must not allow remote participation.

    This absolutism is not necessary to make some changes for the better, in my opinion. As someone who’s mostly just a supporting member but has attended a few business meetings, I think just being able to follow the meeting remotely, and vote on the issues, would be a huge improvement over the current system.

    It would not require changing anything regarding deciding who (and how) gets to speak at the meeting. It would remove the bogeyman of “having a 1000 persons wanting to speak”, and it would also fix the common argument against non-attending people being able to vote, i.e. that they wouldn’t be able to hear the arguments for and against at the meeting.

    This would still require a remote voting system (including verifying that the participants are members), but I think that is a much smaller challenge.

    I would bet there are many times more WSFS members that would like to have a say in the decisions by voting than people actually wanting to speak at the meeting. This would benefit them, including not only supporting members, but also people attending who might have issues physically being in the room (from accessibility issues to just choosing to follow the morning meeting from their hotel room).

    I keep talking about being a supporting member on purpose, because currently I need to just give my support to whatever those people literally in the room decide. Allowing this remote participation (even if it’s not 100% the same) would make me feel a lot more “a WSFS member”.

42. Mike Glyer on December 14, 2023 at 8:41 am said:

    Kevin Standlee: While I said I didn’t blame you for the Worldcon Business Meeting culture, it’s clear from your attempt here to focus only on extreme alternatives that you don’t want any solutions that might change it either.

    Not true. I just don’t think that the “town meeting” form of government works anymore. The membership is too large. I think we need to move to an elected representative form of government, allowing all members to elect people to a Council of WSFS that would take the place of the WSFS Business Meeting (and would be required to hold its meetings in a way that allows all members to see the deliberations, whether that be at Worldcon or elsewhere or online only). Any constitutional changes passed by the Council would have to be ratified by a vote of the members of the following year’s Worldcon.

    I would also not object to including a right of a given number of members to submit constitutional changes directly, with such changes also still having to be ratified by the following year’s members.

    See, I have a system that I think would work, and would actually increase the potential for more members to participate in the governance process without having to devote so much time to attending meetings just so they can vote on the one item about which they personally care, which IMO is what most people want.

    I hope you’ve already realized the Worldcon is just a couple years away from becoming another zombie con like Westercon.

    Maybe we need to stop holding in person events entirely. Everyone should stay home, lock their doors, and hide under their beds. And if you’re not highly connected to the internet and live entirely online. you don’t count as a Real Human Being and can be safely ignored.

43. I don’t believe that people are thinking through what allowing remote voting in the Business Meeting implies. If it is a problem that currently a government or other entity with enough money can recruit and pay the fees (voting fee and supporting/WSFS membership in the administering convention) for enough site selection voters to control the selection, isn’t it clear that they could recruit and pay the fees for enough Business Meeting voters to control the decisions of the Business Meeting? Perhaps we should fix the problem of site selection being for sale rather than instead making the
    Business Meeting for sale.

44. Mike Glyer: I would point out that it is normally the case that most of the business to come before the WSFS Business Meeting is announced in advance and there are no restrictions on handouts. So you can write up your comments on such announced business and distribute them at the Business Meeting.

45. Donald Eastlake: So what? A handout is not a discussion. Without discussion ideas can’t be refined. Consensus can’t be built for better outcomes.

    Every year I try to compensate for the business meeting’s limited forum by opening discussion here. Which puts me in the position of having to persistently ask whoever is running the business meeting to make the agenda with the submitted business available. It’s always a struggle.

46. Mike Glyer: I guess my point was that creating and distributing a handout on a topic is better than not being able to present your thoughts at all to the Business Meeting, which pretty much has to happen for some people if there is not enough time for all those who wish to speak to a question.

    When you are trying to get the agenda, I suggest you invoke Section 4.4 of the Standing Rules:

    All WSFS Committee Reports, Worldcon Annual Financial Reports, and New Business submitted to the Business Meeting before the deadline established in Section 5.1.6 of the WSFS Constitution shall be made generally available to WSFS members (e.g. via publication on the host Worldcon’s web site) by no later than seven (7) days after the deadline for new business set in Section 5.1.6 of the WSFS Constitution.

    This deadline for the distribution of new business was not met for the Chengdu Worldcon primarily because of business that had been “submitted” by being sent to the Business Meeting Chinese staff, but which was not translated and forwarded to me in a timely fashion. Nevertheless, the agenda was announced early enough that many items on it were discussed in this venue, I believe, and other venues.

47. Mmm.. one interesting aspect re the only, at present, known bid for Worldcon 2027 (ie Tel Aviv) is that, currently that is where Dublin 2029 will thus have to make its bid and be voted on. Perhaps another bid venue for 2027 may emerge…?? [ Mm.. at least the only known bid for Worldcon’s “little brother” : Eurocon 2027 (Lisbon, Portugal) has no known issues..! ]

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