(1) KILL YOUR DARLINGS. Jason Cordova of Mad Genius Club thinks after a month of writing, you need “NaDecEdMo!”
Why is that, though? Why do we get to have a NaNoWriMo and not a NaDecEdMo? Because NOBODY wants to be that butthead who is celebrating an author who is gutting their baby.
That’s what editing is, in a nutshell. It’s taking out that precious baby of yours and changing it, ruthlessly making it better. It’s a rough, rough time for an author when this is going on. The author is feeling insecure about their novel as is, and now they have to look at it with a critical eye. That cute scene that you really liked but now doesn’t really fit into the story as much? Gutted like a day old fish on Market Street.
(2) SALE. Francis Hamit of Brass Cannon Books is running an experiment – and you can save.
A consultant has told us selling e-books for 99 cents each will inspire those customers who like them to then buy the print edition to have forever. . What the heck! We’ll try it. All fiction e-books and mini-memoir are now going for 99 cents each in e-book form for a limited time only. Starting February 5th, 2016.
(3) PLYING THE KEYBOARD. Nancy Kress asked her Facebook followers —
Since I am always behind the curve on everything, I have just become aware that nowadays people put one space after a period in manuscripts instead of two spaces. Is this widespread? Do I need to learn to do this? I’ve been doing it the other way for 40 years; old habits die hard.
(4) BY THE NUMBERS. Natalie Luhrs of Pretty Terrible looks for statistical evidence of bias in “A Brief Analysis of the Locus Recommended Reading List, 2011-2015”.
I want to preface this by saying that I believe that the Locus staff works very hard on this list and intends for it to be as comprehensive as they can make it. I know how hard it can be to stay on top of the flood of fiction and other affiliated works that are produced each year.
But I also believe that Locus has a responsibility to think about their biases so that lists of these type don’t inadvertently perpetuate structural inequalities–as our field’s magazine of record, this Reading List is published around the same time that Hugo nominations open and while qualified members of SFWA are filling out their Nebula nomination ballots.
One of her many graphs shows —
…The majority of the authors or editors of the works included on the Locus list are male–over 50% each year. Female authors or editors come in second in the 35-40% range. Mixed gender collaborations are next, followed by non-binary authors and editors….
(5) A NEWS STORY ABOUT NO NEWS. Bleeding Cool gives a status on some aging litigation in “Disney Pursuing Stan Lee Media For Half a Million, Finds Bank Accounts Emptied”.
With Hillary Clinton running for President, her association with convicted drug dealer and fraudster Peter F Paul and Stan Lee Media may well hit the headlines again.
Paul run the (then) largest political fundraiser ever for her Senatorial campaign and tried to get Bill Clinton onto the board of his company Stan Lee Media. The company was set up to exploit Stan Lee‘s name after he left Marvel Comics, to benefit from his new creations for comics, TV and films.
It all went sour rather. And Stan Lee Media – a company no longer associated with Stan Lee – has spent the last ten years trying to claim rights to all Stan Lee’s creations from Marvel – and now Disney. Despite six courts saying they have no claim.
Stan Lee Media have claimed that Lee transferred all his creative rights to the company in exchange for a large sum of money, and that includes Spider-Man, The Avengers, the Hulk. X-Men, Thor and the like. Unfortunately the courts really don’t see it that way. And Disney was awarded almost half a million in costs.
ScreenRant continues, adding its two bits:
The ongoing issue has come up again largely because of old political connections involving Stan Lee Media co-founder Peter F. Paul, a businessman and former convicted drug-dealer notorious for a series of allegedly illegal international political dealings. Paul fled the country during the initial SLMI investigation for Sao Paulo, which became a mini-scandal in United States politics when it was uncovered that Paul had been a major financial backer of Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate Campaign and had even lobbied for former president Bill Clinton to join Stan Lee Media’s board of directors. Paul at one point produced videos supposedly showing Stan Lee himself participating in campaign-finance calls with the Clintons as proof of his (Lee’s) complicity in the company’s bad dealings (Lee counter-sued over the matter). However, it didn’t stop Paul from being convicted to a ten year prison term in 2009 for fraud.
(6) MESKYS’ GUIDE DOG PASSES AWAY. It’s as if the beginning of the New Year also signaled the opening of the floodgates of misery, with one sad loss after another.
Ed Meskys, a blind sf fan, reports, “This morning I lost Gyro (public name ‘Killer Dog’) my guide dog with 9 years of service, just weeks past his age of 11…. He had been welcome at many conventions, SF and [National Federation of the Blind]. He will be my last dog guide as I am weeks short of 80, cannot bend to pick up after a dog, and have trouble with stairs….”
(7) NIRASAWA OBIT. Kaiju designer Yasushi Nirasawa , (1963–2016) died February 2. The Japanese illustrator, character designer, and model maker was known for his work Kamen Rider Blade, Kamen Rider Kabuto, and Kamen Rider Den-O and the creatures in the GARO series.
(8) MITCHELL OBIT. Edgar Mitchell, who 45 years ago became the sixth man to walk on the moon, died February 4, on the eve of his lunar landing anniversary. He was 85.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- February 5, 1953 – Walt Disney’s Peter Pan premiered.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born February 5, 1914 – William S. Burroughs.
(11) SCIENCE SHOWS CANADIANS ARE NICER. Oliver Keyes says “When life gives you lemons, make science”.
Ever since my writeup on leaving R my blog has been getting a lot more traffic than usual and many more comments. Usually this would be fine except the topic means that a lot of those comments are blathering about whiny SJW babies or actual death threats. 28 at the last count.
But, sure, it’s the social justice people who are oversensitive and fly off the handle…
This isn’t a formal study so my definition of arsehole can be basically whatever I want it to be. I settled for any comment which exhibited one of the following traits:
- Accused me of lying about everything that had happened to get some benefit that apparently comes alongside threats, harassment and weird emails. Nobody has explained to me what this benefit is but I eagerly await my cheque in the mail from the nefarious SJW cabal apparently causing me to make shit up;
- Contained threats, goading-towards-suicides, or generally obscene and targeted harassment;
- Used terms like “SJW” or “pissbaby” or “whinging” or really anything else that indicated the author had, at best, a tenuous grasp on how the world works;
- Was premised on the idea that I was “oversensitive” or “overreacting” which is pretty rich coming from people whose idea of acceptability includes insulting people they’ve never met on somebody else’s website.
So I took this definition and hand-coded the comments and grabbed the data. We ended up with 107 users, of whom a mere 40 weren’t arseholes, producing 183 comments in total. Then I worked out their referring site and geolocated their IP address, et voila.
(12) RABID PUPPIES. Vox Day posted his picks in the Best Fanzine category.
This appears to be one of those increasingly misnamed and outdated categories, but based on the previous nominees, it has apparently become the functional equivalent of “best SF-related site”. Using that as a guideline while keeping the eligibility rules in mind, here are the preliminary recommendations for Best Fanzine:
Black Gate succumbed to the genetic fallacy in turning down last year’s nomination; regardless of whether John O’Neill will do the same or not again this year, it remained the best SF-related site in 2015.
People I respect have suggested I publicly demand that Vox Day remove File770 from the Rabid Puppies slate. Then having done so, if Day fails to comply and I ultimately receive a Hugo nomination, they feel I can accept it with a clear conscience.
If I understand Steve Davidson correctly, he wants everyone to make a public statement repudiating slates. I don’t think people are unclear on how I feel about slates, thus it really becomes a question whether — by modeling that behavior — I want to encourage Steve to go around hammering people who don’t post the equivalent of an oath. I don’t.
Consider this point. I have been planning to nominate Black Gate because I’ve been reading it since last year’s Hugo contretemps brought it to my attention, and think they do a terrific job. What if they don’t make a public declaration? Should I leave them off my ballot? And thereby fail to do what I tell every other Hugo voter to do, nominate the stuff they think is the best?
I’m not voting for Black Gate because of a slate, and I don’t intend to be prevented from voting for it by a factor that has nothing to do with what I think about the quality of its work. That’s also why I’m choosing not to follow the advice I received about handling File 770’s apperance on the slate, though the advice is well intended.
(13) NUCLEAR TOY. In 1951, A.C. Gilbert, inventor of the Erector Set, released the U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory. Using real radioactive materials, one could witness mist trails created by particles of ionizing radiation.
The set included four Uranium bearing ore samples, and originally sold for $49.50. That would be $400 in today’s dollars.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, and James H. Burns for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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(3) PLYING THE KEYBOARD
I remember distinctly when I encountered the shift from two to one space between sentences. It was when I was working for MZBFM in the early 90s and was briefly confused by that conversion on the formatting checklist that was one of my responsibilities. I don’t recall precisely whether the submissions stylesheet still required two spaces (submissions were still all paper in those days, thought we could generally get authors to mail us a floppy disk once the stories were contracted), but it was definitely the norm for the conversion to be necessary.
I think I may possibly have trained myself out of typing double spaces at this point, but it’s still on my final formatting checklist for every time I send a file back to my publisher.
(4) BY THE NUMBERS
I do so love people who count things!
If someone wanted to provide value (rather than simply criticism) with respect to a comparative baseline, I suppose one could run the gender/ethnicity analysis on Locus’s extensive books received/published listings (sifting out the reprints). It’s still not a complete picture of the state of publishing because not every publishing announcement or new release sent to Locus gets listed. (Ask me how I know.) But it would provide a baseline of what the Locus reviewers and editors consider their starting pool.
Obligatory XKCD (1 vs 2 spaces):
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=106217
I was a long-term holdout for using 2 spaces (which I was taught in my touch-typing class), but eventually broke the habit and switched to 1. 2 spaces mainly makes sense on typewriters and possibly more primitive mono-spaced fonts.
(Showing my age here, my touch-typing class in sophomore year of high school was in a class with 2/3rds manual typewriters, 1/3 electric, with us rotating between the types every so often. That was for half the year–the other half of the year was doing BASIC programming on Apple 2-series computers. The year after I took touch-typing/programming, the typewriters were all replaced with the Apple 2s. The year after that, the Apple 2s were replaced with a network of 286es.)
(1) NaNoEdMo is in March, and has been for years. Of course, who could ever desire writers to research topics they write upon.
(4) BY THE NUMBERS
Strange Horizons do annual stats looking at Locus receipts, and also the M/F balance at various reviewing outlets.
Greg Hullender on February 6, 2016 at 5:05 am said:
(4) BY THE NUMBERS
No, that’s not what she’s doing. Locus may or may not have a bias, either intentionally or not. But what Luhrs is doing is pointing to statistics.
Producing data on percentages of published authors would be interesting and useful. But that would lead us to another impossible-to-find statistic, which is how many quality works by marginalized people are *submitted* to publishers that aren’t accepted? Marginalized people are underrepresented at every stage of the publishing process. It’s not just Locus, it’s everywhere.
Changes in practices: Back when I was in elementary school and helped out in the library, I was taught to alphabetize McX as if it was MacX. Machine sorting has pretty much put paid to this, and yet I can’t give up on it. (I have, however, adjusted to modern practices for tabs and period-spaces despite learning to type on a typewriter.)
Darren Garrison:
There were, I think, two electric typewriters in my first typing class. I used a manual, since I had an Underwood No. 5 at home that I used (wish I still had that). I used to play around with the Selectric at Mom’s office. Too much fun! For a little while, I had a used Selectric that I was unable to fix, so I let someone else have it.
I got to progress from one stage to the next at work. Late 70s, I was adept at matching type placement on a Selectric in order to put in salutations and fill in blanks on forms. Early 80s, the Foreign Language Department’s office replaced its Correcting Selectric II (if memory still toaster) with an IBM Memory Writer (if), which had the ability to remember five pages of typed text! This meant I could type up a test, make all corrections, and then put a ditto master in and produce a slab of perfection that would require no fixing with a razor blade.
Around ’84, I landed a temp job at the University of Houston Physics Department, and on the first day, they asked if I wanted to work at a typewriter or a word processor. I said, ooh, put me on the word processor and just show me how to use it. I had the delight of using a CPT (which made the next several systems I used seem lame and backward) and even figured out crazy stuff like how to do line drawings of a sort on it.
Long story short: I typed and stuff.
@Kip: “we ended up getting around that by taking the extra step of making all the type into a single image”
You couldn’t just embed your version of Souvenir in the PDF, so the printer would use the document’s font instead of the system’s? How gruesome.
Not that I’m one to talk. I still remember defining a couple of custom characters for my old dot-matrix printer – so that when I printed off my customized Vampire: The Masquerade character sheets, they actually had filled-in dots like the real sheets did. I think I was still using an Apple //c clone at the time…
And speaking of kneeling, I have a BDSM-heavy chapter to edit and the author’s just decided the characters need to use aliases at their holiday shindig. This should be fun… and why does my Viggle point count end in 666 right when I say that?
I’m doomed. I just know it.
(12) RABID PUPPIES.
Just back from a sight-seeing trip to VD’s comment section, just so you don’t have to. It’s nice to be loved:
“File 770 is OK as long as you never ever read the vomitous cesspool that is the comments section.”
“File 770’s commenters are to be commended. They found Glyer’s haven a safe space to out themselves as pedophilia advocates and apologists…and possibly practitioners.”
Keep up the good work, guys.
Oh, and they still don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around IRV and EPH.
I learned to type back in the day when “two spaces after a period” was the default. At this point it is habit, the same way I hit the space bar with my right thumb instead of my left. (Indeed at one point I had hurt my right thumb and it became apparent to me that while I *could* use my left it was significantly more difficult and slowed me down a lot.) I only type 50 wpm but that is still fast enough that a lot of it is not consciously decided.
I could probably unlearn it but haven’t been in a situation where I needed to.
I quit doing spaces at the start of paragraphs though. For a while my WP handled that for me, and then I switched over to a sort of no-indent style as a default, (lyric writing, perhaps, because a lot of returns are involved there) and now that looks right to me. Again if people wanted something different I could learn a new way–it just hasn’t been an issue.
@SciFiMike
Given that crowd it is not like we could reasonably expect better.
@Rev. Bob
Maybe if I’d been smarter, I could have embedded them. Even the people I talked to at the paper didn’t seem to know about that one.
Ha ha! Custom dot-matrix characters!
When I started out as the secretary in the math department at CNU (or CNC, as it was then), they had some Epson system in place whose operating system was something called VALDOCS (a subset of CP/M, I recall, that did less) which was screwed coming out of the gate because it assumed a hard disk not in evidence. I discovered that it was possible to customize the fonts, and I cobbled a set of Greek letters and other symbols that made it just barely possible to type papers.
The system was sold to the college by some gent who saw them coming. Most departments had already shed theirs, but we clung a bit longer. I was able to play one or two silly games on it, and I managed to find a place that no longer dealt with the systems but which still had some DRAM batteries, so I was able to solder one in and stop it from constantly losing my settings before we finally dumped it for more modern computrolas.
We got a laser printer, and some fonts for it (back then, they seemed to be a separate investment) and sent the system and its dot-matrix printer off to some warehouse along with the Holy Grail and Jimmy Hoffa, never to be seen again. It took about one day for my boss to start tapping her foot in front of the laser printer, saying, “C’mon. C’mon! This thing is so slow!”
Cat
It was in my first typing class that I picked up a little booklet (still have it) of styles for documents and correspondence. One of them had everything thrown to the left, and it’s been my go-to ever since. I’m pleased that most of the world has followed my example on this.
On a quasi-Hugo related topic, I have reviewed These Are the Voyages: TOS, Season One. This is a comprehensive account of the development and production of the first season of the original Star Trek series. I highly recommend it.
The third volume of this series was published in 2015, and would be eligible in the Related Work category. I am considering nominating all three volumes together as a series (even though volume one was published in 2013, and volume two was published in 2014), because they pretty much are a single work broken up into three volumes.
Regarding Black Gate: it seems to me that their situation now differs from their situation last year in two important respects. First, it was clear then that they were on the ballot because of the slate, since they had not been widely discussed before the slating, while now there is a lot of independent support for them. Second, it took them some time to reach a decision last year, I believe because they felt they ought to consult all their writers, so by the time they decided, the only way they could avoid profiting by the slate was to withdraw; now, by contrast, their position is already clear.
Steve Wright:
My opinion: if “Day” puts something on his slate that is actually worth nominating, then it’s either an attempt at a spoiler tactic, or it’s a case of the proverbial blind pig finding an acorn once in a while. Either way, I don’t plan on letting it affect my behaviour.
One problem that may arise is what to do if Day actually brings something to your attention; what constitutes ignoring him then? I know who Andy Weir is and what File 770 is, so Day isn’t going to affect my decision there. But Pierce Brown had not crossed my mind as a possible candidate for the Campbell, and yet he seems a perfectly plausible one; I’m not going to nominate him, but if he turned up in the ballot I can see myself ranking him above some other candidates. And I hadn’t even heard of this Shamus Young person, but he doesn’t look implausible as a candidate. How to react to them?
@Mark
You always post the coolest stuff.
SH definitely shows how to do this right, but they’re missing an analysis of statistical significance. I don’t think there’s enough data to show that reviewers have any race-based bias, but as far as bias against women, three specific venues fail the confidence test (SFX, Vector, and the New York Review of Science Fiction), one fails with a bias against men (Cascadia Subduction Zone) and the sample as a whole fails with only one chance in 10,000 that the bias in reviews against women was the result of chance.
For confidence, I used 95% divided by 16, since there are 16 magazines tested. At least one or two of Interzone, Analog, Foundation, and Asimov’s must also be biased, but the data don’t tell us which ones. The article reported the totals but not the breakdown, so I had to extract that from their graphs by eye.
@Andrew M
I never heard of him before either, but I spent a whole afternoon reading his stuff, and I loved it. I don’t think he qualifies as a fan writer (he writes about video games) but he’s great.
Fruit of the poisonous tree?
Greg Hullender – I’ll point out that SFWA has recently extended membership eligibility to authors of games, so why wouldn’t a fan writing of such games [in the genre] be eligible?
@Aaron
Interesting, I may check it out, although reading all 3 volumes in time for Hugo noms may be…unlikely.
@Andrew M
Yep, if Black Gate make the ballot I’ll be assuming it’s because they’re an excellent site.
(and also @Greg) Shamus Young is indeed a great writer about video games. He’s also self-pubbed some SF books. I don’t see him as a SF fan writer for 2015 though, because his non-pro writing about games is usually about them as games, not as SF. It’s kind of a fine distinction though, and if anyone genuinely wanted to nominate him (as opposed to just following VD) I’d not argue with them.
I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter about three years after the dawn of time, so when it came time to choose a high school elective I thought typing would be an easy A. IBM Selectrics turned out to be really fussy about how hard you pressed the keys, so I had to relearn everything. I’m probably doomed, due to decades of body memory and spending my twenties typing dictation, to two spaces at the end of sentences and right hand space bar usage. I won the argument with my typing teacher that only handwritten letters should have indentation, so I’m that modern.
(4) BY THE NUMBERS – I like the way Natalie Luhrs’s mind works. It’s an interesting data set and, no, it does not become less interesting because she didn’t analyze all SFnal work published in a given year for a comparison.
(11) SCIENCE SHOWS CANADIANS ARE NICER – Forgive me for blowing the punchline, but Oliver Keyes ended up with 67 out of 107 commenters who were arseholes, coming from various sites. He noted that 100% of commenters arriving by way of Vox Populi exhibited at least one of his four traits for arseholery. They were not the only commenters who did so, just notable for their uniformity. That 67/107 number is important in that no matter how worked up the clown car got, there weren’t a lot of them. Which leads me to:
(12) RABID PUPPIES – Bloc voting, if the bloc is of sufficient size, will always overcome a large crowd of people voting for a large number of entrants, unless there are rules in place that dilute the impact of blocs. I kinda wonder how large the RP bloc is this year, how many of last year’s new voters will also nominate this year and whether there is a similar sense of narrowly focused outrage on the cultural war front, given that much of it can get pointed at national politics instead. I’m thinking all those things, even without a rules change, will dilute the impact of RP. In some ways, though, it depends on Sad Puppies and whether they’re a bloc and how they overlap with VD.
With all due respect to Steve Davidson and others urging OGH to make a public statement repudiating slates, that sounds disturbingly like a call for a loyalty oath to me.
I was going to object to the use of the word “bias” since it’s right in CSC’s description that their focus is on increasing visibility for women; but I guess “bias” isn’t necessarily a pejorative term, just a descripion of statistical trend…
Interesting, I may check it out, although reading all 3 volumes in time for Hugo noms may be…unlikely.
That is certainly understandable – each volume is fairly imposing (more than 600 pages each). On the other hand, I would tell people whop are interested in the subject not to let their size intimidate them, as they are very readable and the pages (at least for me) almost flew by.
@Cheryl S.
I don’t see it as loyalty oath-like. A loyalty oath would be something like pledging loyalty to (or perhaps arguably disavowing) a particular group. This strikes me as disavowing a *tactic*. More like saying “I will not lie cheat or steal” like saying “I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party.”
YMMV, but “I am not a Puppy” and “I don’t approve of slates, do not want to be on them, and ask people to read what appeals to them and pick their honest favorites” don’t strike me as being the same thing despite the fact that to this point only the Puppies have been slating.
My day job involves heavy exposure to court documents, and there is a venerable tradition in that field (in the US at least) of using two-spaces-before-period. Law schools required it in the days of typewriters, and some courts even have it codified in their style manuals. (US courts have style manuals specifying things like typeface and pitch and spacing because there’s always some opportunist trying to squeeze in a few extra syllables, and will reject briefs that aren’t in compliance.) Reading long stretches of dense verbiage is easier if you have landings where your eyeballs can stop to rest. I’ve noticed the tradition is beginning to fade as people make the transition to electronic filings but it became my default years ago, and I have to consciously override it (or just remember to do a search/replace once I’m finished composing).
I will vote for File 770 regardless of any slates (or oaths), because I feel it’s the best in the category.
People can take inspiration from anywhere.
Being made aware of someone worthy, even if is through the actions of the worst of ill-will, is still being made aware of someone worthy.
It never makes one beholden to the ill-willed.
While I know from personal experience simply paying attention to what I read, keeping an eye out to avoid focusing on a very small group of authors while trying to take full advantage of the full range of books available does product tangible results, I would that this might introduce an unseemly degree of artificiality to the process of constructing narratives in my brain by looking at series of arbitrary marks on processed wood pulp.
[ticky]
Also, if RedWombat is hanging round this thread, I bought a Weightless subscription to Mothership Zeta, partly because of the good things said about it here and partly to read your “Bob and the Unicorn” story. I think your story alone made the subscription worth it. Thank you; it was a delight.
Meh. I think it most likely that VD put File 770 on his slate to get (and keep getting) exactly what he’s getting (and will perhaps keep getting): It ensures that File 770 is talking about him.
I think it not unlikely that there will be other entries on his slate whose primary purpose is to get various people to talk about him.
Seeking attention for himself consistently seems to be his primary goal, his most frequent pursuit, and his only real skill. Whatever his imagined and fabricated grievances against John Scalzi, the sf/f community, or the Hugos, and whatever his constantly-shifting goalposts for RP2 are (destroy the Hugos? dominate the Hugos? “best” Tor Books or John Scalzi? blah blah blah), it would be unusual for him NOT to use the slate additionally to try to attract as much attention to himself as possible, and generate as much chatter about himself as he can.
Vox may like quality stuff! OMG! The HORROR! That’s NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE!
lolzlolzlolzlolz
It is so hard to take you people seriously.
Congrats to Mike for not accepting the Stalinist premise.
Wertzone should be nominated for best fanzine this year over anything in Vox Day’s list including file770. The site did a 35 part history of Epic Fantasy that is the most detailed writing on this I have ever seen. It is extremely well done. That alone is Hugo Worthy.
VD likely doesn’t know about the site… so he didn’t nominate it. This is why slates are stupid.
Go checkout wertzone. Id like to file770 give a full blurb about the Writing on epic fantasy. Its absolutely outstanding.
Blind pig and acorn situation. It probably helps that I don’t read Beale’s blog, except very occasionally – anything he recommends, I’m likely to find out about from other sources.
But, well, if he snuffles around and finds one of those acorns, I won’t turn up my nose at it. If it’s good enough, I might even owe him a polite thank-you. If it’s very good (whatever it is), I’ll have a word in the appropriate quarters and see if I can get him the Order of Lenin or something. I’m sure he’d appreciate that.
Cheryl S
I also don’t see it as a loyalty oath, since it’s not like he’s asking anyone to swear loyalty to anyone. Asking for the Rabid Puppy picks to say hey Puppies, vote for what you actually like not what you’re told to if anything seems more respectful of their opinions than a sooper genius telling them who to vote for. Plus he’ll claim victory regardless so it’s not like it matters.
That said I’m not sure what would be unclear about Mike Glyer’s opinion of slates that would need to be clarified.
Nice to see VD nominate a few things based on quality rather than culture war or cronyism, but I wonder if that’s less because of some 4th Gen Warfare mentality and more from the Sads and Rabids spending so much time on explaining what they really meant that they didn’t get much done to be able to nominate.
People can take inspiration from anywhere.
Being made aware of someone worthy, even if is through the actions of the worst of ill-will, is still being made aware of someone worthy.
It never makes one beholden to the ill-willed.
Yes you are now beholden to the fact that not only has Vox Day made worthy recommendations but has made recommendations more worthy then the nominations would be without him and his rabid puppies.
All the shit slinging that has been leveled at him over the Puppies and at Sad Puppies because of his association with them has been for not.
Your comment, other comments here, and Mike’s Black Gate comments have proven him absolutely goddamn right that the Hugos stink worse then Denmark.
You have lost everything and Vox has just won everything.
Not only that but you have handed him something even greater then absolute victory and that is he is now the guy to listen to, to read and to follow if you want want to find out about great new fantasy and scifi works that you have never heard of.
(3) Good heavens, something Weird Al managed to miss in his list of perennial grammar/spelling/punctuation arguments.
Laura Resnick said:
I thought something similar– more people coming to File 770 means more people clicking through to him.
PLYING THE KEYBOARD I don’t know why there’s so much debate about this. Two spaces after a period is the standard for fixed-width font, which is why everyone who learned on a typewriter knows the rule, but variable width fonts only require one.
I’m sorry, but those books are riddled with factual errors. There’ve been several discussions on TrekBBS documenting the problems, including one poster who went to the UCLA archives and double checked some of Cushman’s claims.
(My favorite: in the first edition, Cushman claimed that Fredric Brown’s Arena was at some point republished with a Star Trek book. As proof, Cushman included a image of the cover art. The only problem — the cover was fan art that Cushman found online and included without checking its provenance.)
Andrew M on February 6, 2016 at 9:24 am said:
If it isn’t puppy poop and you want to rank it, rank it. If it is puppy poop, leave it off the ballot. This is the last year for EPH so the strategy is different.
I don’t know anything about Pierce Brown but his book won the Goodreads Choice Award Sci Fi category by double the votes of second place Seveneves. Clearly he has support beyond puppies.
Where you are going to run into trouble and part of the Gambit is to create angst over the editor award. Here you are not voting for a work but for a person. With pups it is going to be all Toni all the time. They want to be able to brag that if not for them Baen in general and Toni in particular would never be considered. They will point to GRRM’s endorsement. They will argue that there is bias by SJWs.
OK. There is bias by SJWs. There is also bias by Pups. Awards by nature have bias. Fans don’t nominate what I like necessarily. That is a feature and not a bug. If Toni should have won, it really is too bad that pups put her on a slate with Vox.
But that will be the argument this year. Vote for Toni even if she is the puppy favorite because she has creds beyond puppydom just like others on the “slate’.
Personally, I have no interest in that award.
@Vasha
Oops. Yeah, when I get deep into “math mode” it’s easy for me to forget that the words don’t mean the same thing in casual conversation. One would hope that a site intended to focus on women would show a statistical bias in their favor!
Those were the only magazines whose gender mix was so different from the average that it could not be attributed to happenstance. The overall bias was so strong that we know there have to be more than that, but we just can’t tell which ones without more data.
Worth noting is that Locus itself was right on the money, with almost zero added bias. That is, the bias in their results was equal to the bias in the work they received. Overall, though, reviewers added more bias to an already biased set.
Sigh.
With some trepidation I checked my own 5-star reviews and was pleased to see that I had an 11/14 female/male split, which wouldn’t be significant even if all the magazines and anthologies actually had a 50-50 split.
@Kendall:
Well, for reasons often discussed here, I’m not nominating for Editor (Long Form) and will vote it No Award in toto. But that has nothing to do with it being “not… for a work but for a person.” Editor (Long Form) is much more fraught than other person ccategories like Editor (Short Form), artists, fan writers, or Campbell simply because of the symbolic weight that puppies have given Weisskopf. I don’t see any way to extract her from their entanglement; I’m just glad I don’t have to make a decision regarding her due to considering the whole category ill-conceived.
Weren’t you also suppose to put two spaces after a colon? Now I can’t remember what the rules were for different punctuation marks.
My favorite keyboard tell is when someone who learned to type on a typewriter that didn’t have a 1 key is still using a capital/uppercase i for 1 when typing numbers.
You kids today have it easy with your fancy 1 keys.
@K8,
I have posted comments and intentionally referred to it as ‘keming’. (I am a bad person.)
@Lois Tilton
Hmmm. I see your point. In that case, I’d like to report (based on several hours spent reading his very detailed analysis of Jade Empire, Oblivion, and Mass Effect 1 and 2) that most of his writing is focused on the story inside the game, with very little commentary on the game play itself. His notion of a “details-based game” vs. a “drama-based game” was very interesting and can be applied to movies and even written SFF. (It’s arguably a generalization of the difference between hard and soft SF.)
Well, when my pin finally arrives I will nominate on merit, subject to the express wishes of the persons involved; for example, John Scalzi has asked not to be nominated.
I don’t give a toss what VD, or anyone else assembling a slate, thinks I should nominate, and I won’t nominate anything which I haven’t read and thought to be Hugo worthy. I’m grateful to people for reccomendations but that’s as far as it goes; if I read the work and think it sucks then it will not be on my ballot, however enthusiastic other people may be about it.
This is really not difficult; people prancing around as if this was complicated seem to lack a sense of proportion…
@Vasha, noted. I was just pointing out that people often say they will read everything and let that guide their choice. With Long Form editor, I am not sure what I would read. At least with a Campbell, there is a particular work or series behind the nomination.
@Hooc Ott:
Good to know. Thanks!
Sorry Zenu, I don’t know why I thought you were Kendall.
You could declare on File 770 that you don’t want to receive any nominations from people who are voting for slates instead of making all of their choices as an individual based on their own tastes.
If I’m looking at a Hugo ballot full of slate choices again this year, I will be interested in learning which nominees opposed the tactic of slate voting before the ballot was announced. I won’t be expecting people to demand their removal from Theodore Beale’s slate. I regard interacting with him in any forum as a total waste of time and never do it. It wouldn’t be fair to expect others to feed the troll.
The puppies will muddy the waters again this year if they get a bunch of nominees I like on the ballot — instead of nominees only they would choose like Castalia House dreck. But how much of a victory would that be for them, really? Nobody would interpret a File 770 Hugo win as a puppy accomplishment.
Jack Lint: Weren’t you also suppose to put two spaces after a colon?
I believe so–and semi-colons, question marks, and exclamation points, too. Commas got one space. I believe the “logic” was that anything that anything that could be consider the equivalent of “end punctuation” got two spaces; everything else got one. And I seem to remember that the two-hyphens-that-indicated-a-dash got a space before and after, whereas regular-hyphens-used-as-hyphens got no spaces at all?
Beale’s transparent tactic in this appears to be putting good or popular things on his slate so he can later point to the hypocrisy of everyone who last year said they’d never vote for things on a slate.
Well, people have intelligence. They can tell when there is an attempt to manipulate them. This is a blatant attempt at that that. Those that took that stance last year, I don’t have to succumb to it.
Not to mention the blatant fact that last year, there was almost no daylight between “I refuse to vote anything on a slate above No Award” and “I refuse to vote crap above No Award”, so we have no idea how many people voted which way.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
That’s OK. I have a Kindle. 🙂