(1) DUALING READERS. Rob Dircks delivered an unexpected bonus to those attending his reading at Queens Library Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author Night – it’s titled “Today I Invented Time Travel”.
I was invited to read from my novel Where the Hell is Tesla? at the Queens Library Sci-Fi/Fantasy Author Night, and decided to write a short story for the evening — when an unexpected visitor showed up…
Here’s a clip from the story:
And my phone found me the top five reasons to go back in time:
- Stop George Lucas from making the prequels to Star Wars.
- Bet on the 1969 Mets.
- Talk to that girl you had a secret crush on in elementary school.
- Kill Hitler.
- Meet Jesus.
(2) TEMPORAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS. For writers determined to stick with real science there are a lot of details to work out, even when it’s only your imagination traveling to the future. R. A. MacAvoy, co-author of Albatross with Nancy Palmer, tells about those challenges.
This ingenious 25-year leap into the future turned from wiggle-room into a straight-jacket. It helped with the science, but not so much, as each of us kept coming up with new discoveries on the news that needed massive re-write. The Higg’s Boson companion (if it is what it seems to be). Gravitational waves.
And that was just the science!
Sweating, sweating, we began to consider all the other important changes in life which would go along with the advances in the sciences and which would touch the lives of the characters in the story even more than The Theory of Everything. In twenty-five years, we assumed, would people still be driving around in automobiles? Seemed likely – as this was not a Zombie Apocalypse novel. Petrol cars? Self-driving cars? Re-write. Rewrite.
Mobile phones. On the wrist, as part of one’s glasses? People still doggedly carrying things the size of card-decks in their pockets? Hey – at least a person in a self-driving car won’t be guilty of much as they babble or text into whatever form of phone they have as their cars zoom them to their destination. Or get lost in a daily traffic jam caused by the inevitable software problems.
And in a moment of O.C.D. we decided to eliminate all references to the daily habit of tea-time in the British Isles. It suddenly seemed too difficult to decide whether or not the increasingly technical lives we lead would have time for such an old custom. Eliminating all references to tea time was perhaps the silliest rewrite. But it explains, better than anything else, the straight-jacket effect of writing in the near-future.
This is only one aspect of the difficulty we found in writing twenty-five years into the future.
(3) TROPE CONSERVATION. Peter McLean on “Why We Shouldn’t Hunt The Trope To Extinction” at Black Gate.
The poor old trope had had a lot of bad press in recent years. A lot of people seem to want to deconstruct the little critter, or subvert it or discredit it. Basically people seem to want to hunt the trope to extinction, and I think that’s unfortunate.
Now I agree some members of the trope herd have got a bit long in the tooth and are probably due for culling. No one really needs to read another fantasy novel where a simple farmboy turns out to be the Chosen One / Long Lost Heir who is foretold by prophecy and destined to save the world, do they? No, so the “Farmboy” trope is probably due to meet the huntsman, and I think the “Damsel in Distress” has probably had her day too.
You very rarely if ever see these tropes in modern fantasy now, and that’s because everyone got sick of them. An overused trope can eventually outstay its welcome and evolve into a cliché, a completely different critter, and that’s when the huntsmen need to come after it. And that’s fine. The world moves on, as Stephen King would say.
But I don’t think we should tar the whole herd of tropes with the same brush just because some of them get old and go bad. Healthy tropes can be useful little critters. Tropes are what help to stop every novel being 1000 pages long.
(4) A SCALZI FIRST. “On The Wall,” John Scalzi’s first zombie story, co-written with Dave Klecha, appears in Black Tide Rising, the zombie apocalypse anthology edited by John Ringo and Gary Poole. The book is due in stores June 7, however, Baen Books has the eARC on sale right now For $15.
(5) ATTEND ZOMBIE TECH. Amazon is hosting a Zombie Apocalypse Workshop, where you can learn to apply Amazon Web Services technology to recover from the end of civilization. Bring your own laptop and shotgun.
Apocalypse Workshop: Building Serverless Microservices – Washington D.C.
Note: The AWS Lambda Signal Corps has recruited sufficient volunteers for our mission, and all registrants from now until March 10th will be placed on a recruit waitlist. Waitlisted recruits will be admitted if space permits on a first-come, first-serve basis so please arrive early.
Scenario: Zombies have taken over major metropolitan areas. The AWS Lambda Signal Corps has built a communications system to connect the remaining survivors.
Learn how AWS Lambda provides a platform for building event-driven microservices, all without the need to provision, manage, and scale servers. In this workshop, we will introduce the basics of building serverless microservices using AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon S3.
(6) CAN ALTERNATE HISTORY BECOME DATED? Fantasy Literature reviewer Marion Deeds, in “1632: The tale is dated but I love its exuberance”, makes it hard to figure out why there are (by her count) 23 books in this popular series. (And she may not know about the 1632 conventions…)
Flint lets us know in the prologue of 1632 that there’s going to be no discussion of quantum physics, magical portals, of clicking our heels together and going home. The story is an exciting live-action role-playing game with a small force of Americans who completely outgun the competition. The competition are evil mercenaries, so we don’t have to feel sorry for them as they are chopped down like a summer lawn under the blades of a riding mower.
There are also a few other things that are not going to be problems for twentieth-century people dumped into the seventeenth century. Here’s a short list: no one’s going to struggle with a sense of psychic displacement or post-traumatic stress; no one’s going to pine for family or loved ones left behind; no one’s going to question the basic premise that they are stuck in the 1630s. No one is going to turn, irrationally, on another group; no one is going to scapegoat anyone; no one’s going to have a spiritual crisis.
A few more things no one in the new America is going to have to worry about: sufficient food, clean water, sanitation, electrical power, medicine, radios or even TV, except they do have to create their own programming. That’s because all that stuff came with them. They have their own coal vein, and Grantsville landed next to a river in Europe, so they have water and fuel for steam power. The area had its own power plant and three machine shops, several doctors and a jewelry store, so that as the various couples hook up, they can all get wedding-ring sets. It’s nice. Knowing they can’t maintain their current level of technology for too long, the Americans decide to “gear down,” and convert to steam power, settling at late-eighteenth/early nineteenth century tech. This is smart. All of this clears away survival-level problems so that Flint can get on with what’s important; those battles.
(7) RICHARD DAVALOS OBIT. Best known for roles in East of Eden and Cool Hand Luke, actor Richard Davalos died March 8 at the age of 85. He also was in genre films The Cabinet of Caligari (1962) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983). And he was the grandfather of actress Alexa Davalos, who stars in Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle.
(8) MICHAEL WHITE OBIT. Rocky Horror and Monty Python producer Michael White died March 9.
His theatre production credits included the West End premieres of The Rocky Horror Show, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and A Chorus Line.
Born in Glasgow, White began his theatrical career in London’s West End producing plays such as Annie and The Rocky Horror Show.
He later went on to produce films, including The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1978, and those which have achieved cult status such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is still regularly screened in cinemas.
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 10, 1876 — Alexander Graham Bell transmitted the first telephone message to his assistant in the next room: “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” (It is not true that the second telephone message was, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can…?”)
- March 10, 1997 — The CW premiered Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There is an oral tradition that Buffy inspired the creation of the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short) Hugo category, and it did receive a couple of nominations before it went off the air.
(10) RABID PUPPIES. After a brief hiatus, Vox Day resumed announcing his slate with “Rabid Puppies 2016: Best Novelette”.
The preliminary recommendations for the Best Novelette category.
- “Flashpoint: Titan”, Kai Wai Cheah
- “Folding Beijing”, Hao Jingfang
- “What Price Humanity?”, David VanDyke
- “Space Raptor Butt Invasion”, Chuck Tingle
- “Obits”, Stephen King
We have been repeatedly informed that homophobia and the lack of diversity is a serious problem in science fiction, and speaking as the leader of Rabid Puppies, I could not agree more. The decades of discrimination against gay dinosaur love in space by the science fiction community stops now, and it stops here!
Let’s face it, there are just three words to describe the only event that might happen in 2016 that I can imagine would be more spectacularly awesome than “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” winning a Hugo Award this year, and those three words are “President-elect Donald Trump”.
(11) HUGO LOVE. Joe Sherry at Nerds of a Feather: “My Favorite Stories Don’t Get Nominated: A Hugo Love Story”.
I love the Hugo Awards because in becoming part of the WSFS I get to add one small voice to the multitude and help pick the nominees for the five best novels / stories / whatevers. In 2014, artist Joey Hi-Fi was one nominating vote from making the final ballot for Best Professional Artist and becoming an official Hugo Award Nominee….
Collectively, a bunch of people who love science fiction and fantasy come together and say that these, these novels and stories and artists and fans – this is the best of what I read and watched last year. These are some of the best of what the genre has produced.
Then, when the nominations come out and also after the awards are given, we can all sit back and think…what the hell is everyone else thinking? Why are they so wrong? That book is terrible and this book that I loved is so much better.
Of course my opinions are right and everyone else is wrong. Of course this is true. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of people who are just like me except that their taste in great fiction isn’t quite the same disagreed. Or, maybe what I loved was their sixth favorite story and they can only nominate five. Or maybe they just never read it because holy crap there is a lot of stuff published every year. I read a LOT and I don’t even scratch the surface of what’s out there. What the Hugo Awards allows me to do is be part of a group where everyone looks at what they read and tries to figure out what the best of that is – and then collectively, the numbers come together and a ballot is produced.
I love the Hugo Awards even when everyone else obviously gets it wrong because at its heart, the Hugo Award nominees are selected by a group of fans who are passionate about science fiction and fantasy. It’s a group of fans who, ideally with no agenda beyond love of genre, point to something they love and say “this, this is awesome.”
(12) LOOSELY WRAPPED. Kate Paulk has a small update on what Puppies can expect at MidAmeriCon II at Mad Genius Club.
Planning for the Puppy Presence at Worldcon continues under wraps until we have things sufficiently stable to make an announcement. The goal there is to be at the convention, have fun (lots of fun), and meet friends face to face. If I can arrange it there will be a PuppyGate in honor of the Jeopardy question and visitors will have to cross the PuppyGate to enter the fun zone.
(13) TRUTH, JUSTICE, AND THAT OTHER THING. Attorney-at-Work blogger Jared Correia finds an excuse to write about a favorite show – “The Truth Is in Here: Lawyer Lessons Buried in ‘The X-Files’”:
The point is that Duchovny did not again discover wide popularity until he made it back to TV, for his turn as debauched author Hank Moody, on Showtime’s “Californication.” Now “Californication” has wrapped, and he’s back on “The X-Files.” Accepting that Mulder was the best role that he’s had, and coming back around to it, feeling at home in it, is the best end for his story.
Sometimes, you can take the circuitous route back to where you belong — but, there’s something to be said for recognizing that you should never have left in the first place.
I don’t think Jared Correia is any relation to Larry, although the click-through ad over Jared’s column “The way attorneys get paid” is very Larry-esque.
(14) GREEN PLANET. CBBC answers the question “Could vegetables grow on Mars?”
The team wanted to find out what could we grown if humans try to live on Mars in the future.
Although they didn’t have real Martian soil, they used dirt supplied by Nasa, which was taken from a Hawaiian volcano that’s thought to be very similar….
But there’s still a long way to go – no one ate the experimental vegetables, because substances in the soil including arsenic and mercury might have made them poisonous.
Now the team are trying to find a way to grow vegetables that are safe to eat.
Wait a minute. So there would have been arsenic in Watney’s potatoes…?
(15) MAD SNACKS. An aeropress is a thing for making coffee. The 2016 Australian AeroPress Championship will be held March 17 —
On the night, Australia’s best brewers will be stirring, steeping and pressing coffee generously supplied by Condesa and roasted by the punks at PMC.
Inspired by the Thunderdome of Mad Max, there’ll be beers, industrial disco balls, heaps of food (unlike the Thunderdome), a DJ in full Mad Max dress (not conformed) and, no doubt, some crazy revellers (confirmed), but weirdly the original Mad Max, Mel Gibson, declined the offer to MC.
(16) PUPPY IN ORBIT. Galactic Journey’s time traveler has the latest (really late) space program news in “[Mar. 10, 1961] Dog and Puppy Show (Sputnik 9)”.
We are definitely not far away from a person in space. The Soviets launched another of their five-ton spaceships into orbit. We’re calling it Sputnik 9; who knows what they call it? On board was just one dog this time, name of Chernushka, who was recovered successfully after an unknown number of orbits. It is pretty clear that the vessel that carried Chernushka is the equivalent of our Mercury capsule, and once the Russians have gotten the bugs out of the ship, you can bet there will be a human at the controls.
This is not to say that the American program is standing still—one of our astronauts may go up on a suborbital jaunt as early as next month. But the Atlas booster, the big one that can put a man in orbit, won’t be ready until the end of the year, at the earliest.
(17) A WRITER WHO WELDS. No, it’s not the Emergency Backup Hugo – it’s Nancy Jane Moore’s “Post-Apocalyptic Spaceship”, at Book View Café .
(18) THE ROCKET’S BLUE GLARE. The New York Times has a story on Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ private space program — “Jeff Bezos Lifts Veil on His Rocket Company, Blue Origin”.
Blue Origin is part of a shift of the space business from NASA and aerospace behemoths like Lockheed Martin toward private industry, especially smaller entrepreneurial companies. Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, founded by another Internet entrepreneur, Elon Musk, has been the most visible and most successful of the new generation of rocket companies. Last Friday, it launched another satellite to orbit, but an attempt to land the booster on a floating platform again ended in an explosion.
Much more quietly, Blue Origin has also had big space dreams, but until now did not give outsiders a look at what it was doing.
For almost four hours, Mr. Bezos, who only occasionally talks to the press, led 11 reporters on a tour of the factory and answered a litany of questions over lunch. He talked garrulously, his speech punctured by loud laughs. “It’s my total pleasure. I hope you can sense that I like this,” he said.
He described an image on a wall in the company’s central area, which showed two tortoises holding an hourglass and gazing upward at a stylized image of the planets and cosmos. Below is Blue Origin’s motto: “Gradatim ferociter,” Latin for “step by step, ferociously” — no cutting of corners, but no dillydallying, either. “You can do the steps quickly, but you can’t skip any steps,” Mr. Bezos said.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Rambo, Cat Eldridge, Mark-kitteh, Seth Gordon, Will R., and Tom Galloway for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day RedWombat.]
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I had assumed she was talking about a room party until I remembered that MAC II is trying to decree that all party functions will be in the convention center hospitality space. It’s not impossible this might turn out to be a literal space inside the con, used on the same terms as offered to everyone else’s parties.
@Jamoche:
At the risk of being pedantic, I think you’re remembering season one incorrectly. It’s not that Scully always had a mundane explanation and was never right. Often, Scully just refused to offer a possible explanation until they had more evidence— which was wise, since equally often, Mulder’s initial idea turned out to be a dead end (e.g. in “Eve” he thought they were dealing with vampires; the real culprits had planted the kind of spooky evidence that Mulder was bound to fall for). Once they were directly confronted with the weird thing, there usually wasn’t time to discuss it because they were busy trying not to get killed, and Scully was good at doing whatever had to be done at that point without arguing about whether the weird thing was possible.
(There was also “Beyond the Sea”, where Scully was the one who believed in the supernatural thing and Mulder refused to consider it. That’s an outlier, but it happened.)
Also, the answer to “why did everyone still think Mulder was a crackpot” is that Scully always wrote reports that amounted to “We couldn’t really figure out what happened here. It’s possible that it was Mundane Explanation X. Agent Mulder suggested Crazy Explanation Y. We’ll probably never know.”
@Mike
After a quick look at what MAC II have on their website about party spaces I think your theory holds water. I’m sure they will have a fine time.
James Davis Nicoll
I took PJ Evans’s comment to mean that one third of England was never in favor of the war, which is consonant with the preceding part of the post.
A safe space for SPs makes perfect sense to me. I highly encourage them to have places they can decompress and relax. Have SP parties every night. Play games, dance, sing, talk books, publishing, eat, drink, and be merry.
But from this and other things various SP leaders have said in the past about this year’s Worldcon I’ve gotten the feeling they are thinking of having an alternative track of programming for puppies. This baffles me.
But I’m sick today so my brain might not be working at all. Going out in public exposed me to something – fever, cough, migraine, joint pain, can’t swallow solids/dry food. There goes my special birthday dinner. Pfft. Percocet is good. 😀
I have a date for my gallbladder surgery! April 14th. Exactly one week before Passover. The craziest time of year for me. Good wishes/prayers/thoughts/etc. that surgery is uneventful would be appreciated as the time gets near. I’ve done this before. Arrived home a week before Passover from rehab after being hit by truck so we have experience in crazy. I did have the option to put off the surgery for another month or two but I couldn’t face that.
Vox sends his thanks:
12) To those giggling that the Puppies want to have an SJW-esque “safe space” at Worldcon, I will at this time remind you of this bit of specialness from Sasquan:
http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2015/04/15/i-will-walk-with-you/
Wherein Vonda McIntyre offered the following:
I’m distressed to see that some folks who were planning to come to Sasquan are thinking of skipping Worldcon this year.
Because they’re frightened.
I understand why people are frightened, given the racist, misogynistic, and dishonest screeds they’ve been subjected to. It isn’t — alas — unusual for verbal abuse to escalate into physical abuse; and anyway verbal abuse is no fun to begin with.
So yes, I believe Kate Paulk and company would indeed be very wise to have an SJW-exclusion zone, where people can go and won’t be spit on for wearing an MHI shoulder patch or a Sad Puppies t-shirt.
As we have seen over and over and over and OVER again here at Mr. Glyer’s blog there is a certain constituency for Puppy hate, and WorldCon will have a lot of them in one place. It’s easier to have fun when there isn’t some retard up in your face screaming that your hat badge “triggered” them.
4) A SCALZI FIRST
The book cover art is highly offensive and sexist in the extreme. Very disappointed that John would support this kind of thing. Looks like a big book contract and money cushion has made another straight white male indifferent to misogyny. His female fans deserve better.
Ho-hum, Vox lurches on to the “Nick Cole was censored by trad pub” bandwagon with all the subtlety of a Space Raptor. I suppose that’s a marginal uptick in his trolling compared to using Chuck Tingle. Nice of him to recommend a tor.com novella as well, although I didn’t think The Builders was among the best in their line-up.
@The Phantom:
Oh holy fuck. Can you not, please, call people you disagree with “retards”?
TheYoungPretender: I cringe right along with you when I hit the kind of dated althist you’re talking about.
That’s not what the article is talking about. As best I can tell, she thinks it’s not angsty enough. The book follows the people who rise to the emergency and largely ignores the people who don’t cope as well. And I think she missed some of the things she says she was looking for, because the cracks in the town’s society are definitely there before the climax of the book, just not yet wide enough to disrupt the initial efforts at survival.
KT: Why do you think that Scalzi saw the cover art before submitting his story? Even the editors probably didn’t see it much before publication. Is Bujold “indifferent to misogyny” because Baen stuck an offensive cover on Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance?
Here’s a hint: even with novels, authors with publishing houses hardly ever get much, if any, say about what goes on the cover. With anthologies? Even less. Only in self-pub is the author guaranteed to have cover art control.
Yeah the French Navy played a very important role in the American Revolutionary.
I fondly remember an online dispute between an an American and a French guy in which the American pulled out the old line ‘if it weren’t for us you’d all be speaking German’.
The French guy wrote back ‘Well, if not for us, you’d all be speaking English!
That is outstanding. I guarantee I will be repeating that line soon…
@Tasha Turner – I hope for your speedy recovery. Also for better luck around Passover.
Have there been spitting incidents?
Thank you for the illumination.
@The Phantom
Has your scenario of Puppy dislike escalating to physical assault actually played out? Because absent evidence to the contrary that sounds a lot like a bogeyman built out of nothing.
ETA: ninja’d by PIMMN 🙂
Mike Glyer said:
I don’t know about “decree”; wasn’t the word that they were unable to negotiate a corkage waiver* with any of the hotels they could have run parties in?
*For readers who aren’t familiar with the term, ConRunner has a nice explanation.
@KT
Scalzi and Ringo are friends if I recall correctly. He’s also been talking about doing a project with Baen for a year or two if something came along. Very few authors get any say in the book cover. Even less so for an anthology where they are a minor author and not the main long-term editor of a series.
Search Scalzi’s blog and you’ll find an interesting post on why he got involved in this particular anthology (the original post not the recent one). It was not for the big bucks.
If VD had recommended the Space Raptor non-novelette and the dead elk had gone along with the recommendation, probable given their deep love of the Tingle-verse, would it be likely the Hugo administrators would then move it and its votes to the appropriate award category?
@mark I wonder what happened to that Tor boycott, then…
re: puppy zone
I’ve found that, as a general rule, the use of the word “zone” in the name of a place has a nearly-direct negative correlation with the amount of time I want to spend there.
Maybe they could set up a DMZ outside the PZ, as some sort of SF/F analog to the Locarno Rooms in 1925?
In today’s amusing news, apparently a NPR news story triggered a bunch of listeners’ Amazon Echoes to tweak their central heating. The revolution of the machines comes from the radio!
Score one more for the machines.
http://qz.com/637326/amazon-echo-home-alone-with-npr-on-got-confused-and-hijacked-a-thermostat/
@Mike
*facepalm* That’s not what I wanted to happen. Ah well.
Anyway, for those of you who are curious about the contents of Tingle’s work, while the lovely Mark Oshiro does not have a live reading of SRBI, he has read “Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt” before a live audience: [Youtube] (NSFW, naturally)
@Petréa Mitchell
Y’know, I’d been rolling with the HoMiNA (except for MACUSA. C’mon, you couldn’t have snowcloned from POTUS and SCOTUS and had the more pronounceable MACOTUS?) in a *gets popcorn* sort of way (while sympathizing with the criticism), but even I had to stop when I read that all American students went to Ilvermorny and came out proficient with wands. With the earlier focus on American Indian wandless magic, it put me too much in the mind of the residential boarding schools discussed a few threads ago. If this similarity were explored, I wouldn’t mind the detail, but without any commentary it doesn’t seem like JKR is aware of the implications.
@Mike – I know, right?
Re alt hist Civil War, I just remembered a doozy of a short story by Winston Churchill, of all people. He had Lee take Washington DC, ending the war but all so giving him so much power and status in the South that he was able to abolish slavery by fiat. The USA and CSA forget their differences and enter with Britain into the English Speaking League. Because Britain has so many powerful all lollies in 1914, it alters the Kaiser’s calculus, and basically WWI never happens.
It was pretty silly, all up.
So far as I know the things to happen to puppies at Worldcon last year:
1. Some badge ribbons were deemed offensive and confiscated. Happens all the time – fans think their being cute when they are actually being offensive
2. They were voted NA and took offense to the asterisks handed out.
3. PNH kinda swore at JCWs wife who was stalking him insisting he listen to her & something something
4. If they brought up puppy talking points they were either told why their points weren’t logically correct, asked to show proof, or walked away from.
5. No puppy at Sasquan filed a harassment or assault charge with the concom or the local police.
In reaction to the above lack of violence against them by unarmed non-puppies a number of puppies have said they intend to conceal carry regardless of Worldcon’s weapons policy.
I repeat I’m all in favor of them creating SP safe spaces. Less in favor of SP separate programming if I’ve understood them correctly. If I’ve misunderstood I owe a number of puppy leaders sincere apologies.
@The Phantom
I was at Sasquan, and it was a fun, relaxed place. The Puppies didn’t come up often in conversation, but I didn’t meet any, and when people did talk about them, everyone had the same observation: “Looks like they didn’t come.”
The sole exception was one woman who spoke at the business meeting and said she was a Sad Puppy, but, if I remember right, she spoke in favor of EPH. Other than that (and excluding the Hugo nominees, of course) they seem to have been a no-show.
Why do you think they’ll turn up at MidAmeriCon2?
@The Phantom
Did this happen outside or inside your own head?
Re KT
Let’s remember their last screed here for we start imputing good faith.
I wasn’t giggling but I could see how some amusement could be drawn from it because of the IRONY given a tendency to mock such things among non-puppies. Citing cases were non-puppies expressed concern about their safety sort of really only helps underline the irony bit Phantom.
We are a busy crew – helping the Sad Puppies organize their parties, helping Vox with his eligibility checks, fixing the flux-capacitor on the transdimensional vortex that the evil hordes of the Vartax demon-dimension intend to use to invade Earth, offering free-cover design advice to Baen,…
Do we have to call out the Happiness Patrol? (Huh. I imaged-searched it for cosplay ideas, and damn but that must’ve been a low point for DW budgets.)
Wouldn’t surprise me; I only watched season one once, back when it was new. Whether Scully had an explanation or not, or whether Mulder’s first guess was right or not, didn’t really matter – the problem was that I do remember wondering if it was going to have a mundane explanation *this* time and – at least in the first 2/3 of that season – it didn’t.
Count me among the unconvinced–although I note that the claim is that what will be deprecated is tea-time (the daily meal/snack/ritual) and not tea (the drink). Tea will live on, as will tea-time, as will breakfast, lunch, coffee, going out for coffee, and also winding up at an all-hours diner after the bars close and/or the concert is over, assuming, of course, that all-hours diners live on as well. (THEY HAD BETTER.)
I just finished a reread of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and was amusedly reminded of this Pixel Scroll item when I reached the bit where a captain in the war against Napoleon is teaching a group of Lakota warriors to drink tea, “presumably with the idea that once a man had learnt to drink tea, the other habits and qualities that make up a Briton would naturally follow.”
Word is that at the time the BBC was trying to starve the program into nonexistence. Its not very subtle criticism of the loathsome Margaret Thatcher, beloved of Jimmy Savile and other BBC darlings may have had something to do with it.
Khitty Hawk: I don’t link to porn. Don’t know whether I’ve ever said that explicitly.
(I’m sure someone is now trying to figure out how I let their thing pass. Here’s an example of an edge case. I wouldn’t stop somebody from linking to a page where you could buy a Chuck Tingle book. But if there was a link to directly download the file, I wouldn’t host that.)
Dawn Incognito on March 11, 2016 at 1:53 pm said: “Oh holy fuck. Can you not, please, call people you disagree with “retards”?”
For my money, ‘retard’ is pretty mild compared to what Puppies get called around here. And really, what else does one call a presumably educated and successful individual who gets up in your face over a hat badge/shoulder patch/t-shirt or what have you?
Stoic Cynic on March 11, 2016 at 2:05 pm said: @The Phantom Has your scenario of Puppy dislike escalating to physical assault actually played out? Because absent evidence to the contrary that sounds a lot like a bogeyman built out of nothing.
My scenario? Did I set up an “I will walk with you” list at Sasquan in case somebody might be wearing the wrong t-shirt? Did I write a blog post saying: “It isn’t — alas — unusual for verbal abuse to escalate into physical abuse” regarding Sad Puppies?
Greg Hullender on March 11, 2016 at 2:54 pm said: @The Phantom Why do you think they’ll turn up at MidAmeriCon2?
Kate Paulk says she’s going. I wish her very good luck with that, I’d sooner watch paint dry. More interesting and less stressful than watching a bunch of SJWs try to one-up each other in virtue signalling.
@Mike
Understandable. I couldn’t find a set of guidelines and figured as long as it didn’t embed, it’d be okay. Thanks for the clarification and my apologies for violating the guidelines.
The Phantom: Of course you’re not going. How would you be able to remain an anonymous troll?
@The Phantom
Well, if Sasquan is a typical example, I never saw anything like that happen. I saw lots of panels on different aspects of SFF, chatted with fun people in line, and listened to a lot of discussion about the mathematics of EPH, but as far as the sort of “SJW” stuff you guys talk about, I didn’t see or hear any of it. Some people were sad that you guys had spoiled the awards for the year, but I don’t remember hearing any anger over that–just commiseration with the poor Sasquan folks who’d worked so hard to try to make something nice.
the Phantom:
Nobody here giggled, and most were sympathetic. Whaqt giggling there was was mostly that this is the same crowd which wants to laud things like “Safe space as rape room” so they usually have an issue with safe spaces. I see a lot of concession that it’s often easier to cope with a chance to cool down with like minded people, though.
Cite one case of a puppy being spat on or snubbed. I was in a conversation where someone stated that PNH physically assaulted Lamplighter, and this justified concealed carry; when it was pointed out he never laid a hand on her, they tried to change tack to observe that assault means verbal abuse (Which is not physical) but did not overall back down on this being justification enough.
Where what Vonda McIntyre is offering in the case of someone fearing verbal abuse and escalation? “I will walk with you”. She will accompany the person (Without mention of weaponry or self-defence, just the physical presence of another human being, and a known one.)
You’re trying to say these two reactions are equivalent?
Here’s the other kicker, though: Kate Paulk wasn’t talking about a safe space to avoid assault. She was talking about a safe spakce to hang out with puppies and have fun. Even if her language seems a bit forced, she’s not saying “we need a safe space because the Filers are scary”. Nobody was, until you did.
(I also want someone to cite for me the time when PNH needed to be chided by security, never mind fended off with a weapon, but nobody has. Yet he’s been in convention fandom since he was 19.)
1) Mockery is not hate. Exasperation is not hate. Even dislike of another person’;s actions is not hate. Very few people here hate, and those few who maybe might are not generally inclined to violence.
2)”Retard”. Don’t use that word. Just don’t.
3)Screaming – again, cite cases someone did
4) Triggered; You have no idea what triggers really are. The Last thing someone with a real trigger will be doing is being in your face screaming — even if you have something implying non-consensual acts are ok in front of an abuse victim. They may speak up about it or report it, but they won’t be screaming at you like that. A sad puppy logo won’t trigger anyone.
So; Not much mocking, and mostly not for the reasons you cite. Nobody here is intending violence and if afraid of violence, their reaction is to reach for the safety of numbers and known and respected authorities, not gunfire.
Did someone mention dirt?
I’ve been spreading bat guano. It’s pretty awesome, but we’ll see how the garden grows…
@The Phantom:
Well, first of all, I would certainly try to speak up if I saw anyone here calling Puppies “retards”. I don’t care for using real people as slurs.
What does one call a presumably educated and successful individual who gets up in your face over a hat badge etc.? I called someone a “chucklefuck” the other day. Hell, even “asshole” or “asshat” or “douchenozzle” or “clown” (OMG anti-clown bigotry!). Even “SJW”, I don’t particularly give a fuck on that one. There are ways to insult people that doesn’t insult developmentally delayed people along with them.
I know I’m just one poster here, but I’m asking again as politely as I can. Please refrain from using “retard” to insult people. Even if you think they’re overreacting or being irrational. Please.
Thank you.
Seconded, Dawn. That one’s genuinely hurtful to a lot of people. Uncool.
(I say this in full knowledge that Phantom will doubtless scamper gleefully back to his comment section of choice, crowing about how he triggered all the special snowflakes. Still, one tries to argue for decency whenever possible.)
Citations, please, with links. If such name calling actually exists it should not be too difficult to find.
Unless you are saying that accurately naming a racist a racist or a homophobe a homophobe, with citations and direct quotes as evidence, is more offensive than what you have done.
@Tasha: “I have a date for my gallbladder surgery!”
Doesn’t sound like my idea of a romantic outing, but you do you… 😉
@RedWombat:
That might have been me. I’ve been reading up on the mind-boggling complexities of soil types.
(At first I mistyped “soul”, which sparked some interesting thoughts)
RedWombat: (or anyone else) My google-fu has failed. Is there any chance you have a link to your rants on seed bombs and all the reasons they’re usually useless?
(I am not, thank goodness, intending to set you off again, just to find the prior instance)
@RedWombat:
Yep. I’ll admit I’ve been working really hard to remove certain words from my vocabulary. This being one. It got much easier when I became acquainted with a young man with Down’s Syndrome. Funny, that.
6) I’ve never read Eric Flint beyond his posts on last year’s Hugo debate (which I quite liked). But I guess I will be skipping his 1632 series. I’m from Germany (though not from Thuringia) and my reaction to American writers tinkering with German history is quite similar to that of many people here and elsewhere to J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America or to that of Chicagoans to Jim Butcher mangling the geography of their city. Now it’s quite possible that the actual book manages to be better than the summary makes it sound, but the review doesn’t give me much hope.
And BTW, the reviewer (or Eric Flint) misspelled Breitenfeld. Which is in Saxony and nowadays a suburb of Leipzig rather than in Thuringia. Breitenfeld managed to be the site of three important battles BTW, two during the Thirty Years War as well as the Battle of the Nations in 1813. There are monuments to all battles, too, though the one for the Battle of the Nations is the biggest. The whole area is a wide and flat plain, so it was ideally suited to battles, especially without the modern day roads, exhibition halls, malls, etc… that clutter up the landscape.
11) Nice post. Joe Sherry gets it.
@Phantom: Echoing what others have said, “retard” is a nasty ablist slur. Please find some other term for people who disagree with you.
That’s got to be one of the most generously fed trolls I’ve seen in some time.
More interesting and less stressful than watching a bunch of SJWs try to one-up each other in virtue signalling.
The imaginary Worldcon attendees in your head bear no relationship to the reality of Worldcon attendees. That’s not surprising, as it seems that pretty much nothing in your head bears any relationship to reality.