Pixel Scroll 4/28/16 All My Hugos

We’ll divide the Scrolls again today. This is the Hugo-oriented one.

(1) PERMISSION GRANTED. Glenn Hauman, rebutting a post by John Scalzi, says creators should not be discouraged from withdrawing, in “Neil Gaiman Does Not Need A Pity Hugo” at ComicMix.

(By the way, what follows is offered by Hauman as a hypothetical Neil Gaiman quote – Neil hasn’t actually said this.)

Neil Gaiman is well within his rights to say, “Yes, I believe Sandman: Overture is Hugo-worthy, but I don’t think I should win just because Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor was pushed off the ballot. I said The Sculptor was the best graphic novel I’ve read in years, it says so on the cover of the book. If I’m not going against that, it’s not a fair competition.”

Neil Gaiman does not need a pity Hugo. He’s already won five Hugos, fairly. He does not need a fixed fight to win them.

Lois McMaster Bujold does not need a pity Hugo. She’s already won four Hugos for best novel, tying the record. She does not need to play against the literary equivalent of the Washington Generals.

Stephen King does not need a pity Hugo. He’s Stephen Goddamn King. (And he won one in 1982.)

And getting votes for being the only good candidate in a bad field, a deliberately weakened field, is getting a pity Hugo….

(2) HUGO AWARDS REPEALED. Matthew Foster (who credits my fan writer nomination to the Sad Puppies, because we all know how much they love me) offers this take: “Here We Go Again – Welcome To The Vox Awards”.

So there it is. You, the regular fans, made nine choices. That’s it. The rest were hand picked by Vox or the Sads. Might you (the plural you) have chosen some of those same works/people? You might have. But you didn’t. Vox chose them. And the Pups chose the rest Y’all (going Southern for clarity) did not. Y’all chose nine and that is all. Sure you can go with the “Well, I would have…” Yes, but you didn’t. Vox did. So if you are happy with Vox handing your choices, then go ahead and just somehow say it’s all OK.

And that’s what I’m already seeing. And it started last year. George and John and Mary, much as I like them, were wrong. They went with the “Oh, just vote for the best of what’s there and it will work out.” No, that wasn’t the thing to do and it didn’t work out. This year even the Sads didn’t do that well, though they did better than fandom. Vox did. The 2016 Hugos are NOT the Hugo Awards. They are The Vox-hugo. They will celebrate the best in what Vox likes. If you go along with it, you are not voting for the Hugo winner. You will be voting for the Vox-hugo winner.

There are no Hugo awards for 2016.

(3) LOVE WON’T KEEP US TOGETHER. Amanda S. Green expresses her vision of fandom in “And so it continues — Hugo Awards Part Whatever”.

The Dragon Awards are exactly what a fan award should be. You don’t have to pay for the privilege to nominate or vote. All you have to do is register online. You can embrace your inner geekdom and fandom and not worry about someone condemning you because you might not be of the same political or social ilk as the next guy. It is a celebration of the genre, something the Hugo used to be.

So here’s the thing. Let the Fans have the Hugo. Vox has already pretty much burned it down anyway. Let the Fans have the award they can be “proud” of. Let the Hugo fade into obscurity. Wait, it pretty much already has where the every day fan is concerned. Fandom is aging. Fandom (with a small f) is growing. We see it with the ever increasing size of the various Comic-Con conventions. We see it with the increasing size of DragonCon. Those cons will help save fandom. I’m not sure Fandom can be, not as long as it continues to insulate itself from the rest of us.

So here’s my recommendation. If you are going to vote for the Hugos, do so based solely on one criterion. Do you believe the work deserves to win the Hugo, a fan award that once meant everything in the genre and not just to some fans and authors but to fandom in general? If you do, then vote for it. Do not vote for something — or against it — because of who nominated it. Vote on the work. Does it entertain? Is it well-written? If it has a message, did you enjoy that, learn from it or did it beat you over the head until you wanted to throw it against the wall?

In other words, unlike the other side, I’m advocating that you judge the work itself and nothing else. For me, I’m registering for the Dragon Awards and casting my vote there. Then I’ll stand back and watch Vox bring the Hugos to their knees because Fandom was foolish enough to think they could push him into a corner and he would back down.

(4) SPLAT. Marian Crane’s “Another year, another Hugo Awards pie fight” is well worth a visit for the pie fight GIF.

At least one author (Dr. Chuck Tingle, of Amazon Kindle Dinosaur Erotica fame) was apparently Puppy-chosen for his potential shock value to the fainting left-wing violets. Which shows the former might not understand fannish humor on the left. Because Tingle…Tingle is like ‘Robot Chicken’ meets Larry Flynt, with a generous helping of meth. He’s filthy and hilarious. But I read andy offutt in his heyday, so don’t go by my tastes, please.

I’m probably a bad person for laughing my ass off at this year’s nominations. The entertainment value alone is priceless. I am about as likely to write something worthy of being nominated as I am to be the first mayor on the Moon, so I normally wouldn’t care about the Hugos. But this year at WorldCon (MidAmerica Con, by its formal name), the Hugo nomination and voting procedures are going to be changed by attending members. Which is why memberships on both right and left, conservative and liberal, have soared this year.

(5) NOVEL IDEA. Michael Damien Thomas posts a thought never before contemplated by the internet.

(6) THE CHORF TINGLE ASTERISK. Larry Correia “On the Hugo Award Announcement” (April 27).

This is going to be brief because I retired from the Sad Puppies campaign last year.

All I can really say to the CHORFs is that they had a chance to deal with people like me or Brad, but instead they decided to be a bunch of pricks and hand out wooden assholes while block voting No Award. In the process they insulted disgruntled fans, and proved that they were a bunch of cliquish elitists just like I’d said they were to begin with.

That’s how you end up with Space Raptor Butt Invasion. Have fun with that.

(7) N.K. JEMISIN TWEETS ABOUT CHUCK TINGLE.

(8) STAYING ON. The crew of the fancast Tales to Terrify, a Hugo nominee on the Rabid Puppies slate, tells “How our 2016 Hugo nomination because a real Tale to Terrify”.

Then, just yesturday, we found out that Tales to Terrify was one of the fancasts on the Rabid Puppies slate. To be honest, it was like the whole thing turned into a real-life horror story. Something to make our most stalwart listener’s blood run cold.

Still reeling from the sheer shock and disappointment, we just wanted to let our listeners and the science fiction community know that we did not know we were on the Rabid Puppies slate. We would never agree to be on their slate. We have never agreed with either the Sad or Rabid Puppies, or their ideas about what science fiction should be and who should write it, or their bullying tactics. We do not support the Puppies’ attempts to ruin the Hugo Awards. We are disgusted that we were drawn into their ugliness without our knowledge. In the words of someone close to Tales to Terrify, “this has been like being presented a polished turd.”

We’re all sickened by it. Tales to Terrify and the entire District of Wonders has always (and will always) celebrate a diverse range of voices, be they authors, narrators, or editors. We do not agree on shutting anyone out or any form of discrimination.

Larry Santoro put so much into the podcast. The entire community adored him – he was a powerhouse and the rock on which the podcast stood. It crushed us all when he passed. Tales to Terrify being on the Rabid Puppies list like this threatens to dishonour his reputation and everything he built the podcast to be. If Larry were around today I’d want him to be proud of what we’ve accomplished. And the Rabid Puppies want to tear that down and disrespect his memory. And it sickens me. It sickens everyone of us. Last year, these Puppies peed all over so many Award categories, and the biggest winner was “no award” – whether there were deserving nominees on the ballot or not. So much of the joy was just taken out of the Hugos for so many… What the Puppies did wasn’t right.

Now it looks like this year’s awards will carry the stink of these Puppies as well. We only hope that the changes in Hugo Award rules for next year will stop them messing on the red carpet anymore. Let’s get back to celebrating what’s great – the works we love.

For now, we need to decide what to do about Tales to Terrify’s sh… uh… slate-stained Hugo nomination. It was a hard call. Honestly, it still is.

After lots of conversations today, and checking out the wise words of George R. R. Martin, John Scalzi, and others, we have decided to allow our nomination to stand. In the LA Times yesterday, John Scalzi said “Hugo voters are smart enough, and trust their own tastes enough, to know the truth.” So, I’d just like to invite you to have a listen when the Voters Packet comes out, think about all the nominations in all the categories, and vote for whatever you consider to be deserving, according to your conscience and good judgement. I’d invite you to vote based on merit, not on a slate. What you feel is worthy.

(9) RULES CHANGE PROPOSAL. Kevin Standlee has distilled his ideas about “Hugo Awards: 3-Stage Voting”.

The key points of 3-Stage Voting are:

Nominating Stage Does Not Change: Nominate up to five works per category per member, with members of the previous, current, and following year’s Worldcons all eligible to nominate.

New Semi-Final Round: The top 15 nominees in each category are put up to a yes/no vote on each nominee in a new Semi-Final round, with only the current Worldcon’s members eligible to vote.

Final Ballot Voting Does Not Change: The five semi-finalists from the first round with the most nominations that are not eliminated in the second round (and who don’t decline or are found to be ineligible) go on to the final ballot, which is voted by the same Instant Runoff Voting system we have used the 1960s.

Now let’s unpack the details of how this would work, because there are a lot of them, and they interact in ways that you might not expect and that I think actually improve the overall process in many ways….

(10) ALWAYS POLITICAL. “Sci-fi’s Tea Party trolls go to war: Battle over prestigious Hugo Awards heats up” at Salon.

…It might be nice to think that science fiction, or any kind of literature or culture, could be free of ideology. But the best science fiction writers have often been deeply political. Perhaps the genre’s greatest-ever novelist, H.G. Wells, was a socialist. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” was driven by environmentalism. Robert Heinlein was a lefty who became a kind of military-worshipping libertarian. Octavia Butler wrote novels suffused which feminism and issues of race. One of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most famous books, “The Left Hand of Darkness,” looked, without scorn, at a race of people who change their genders repeatedly throughout their lives. Philip K. Dick managed to be various odd mixtures of left and right, depending on the time period. Orson Scott Card, author of “Ender’s Game,” is an opponent of same-sex marriage but liberal on some issues….

(11) PERSEVERANCE. Joe Sherry shares Hugo thoughts at Nerds of a Feather.

Now, to loop all of this back to how I opened this essay because it gets to how I really want to respond to the Hugo Awards and how I intend to move forward both through the rest of this year and in the future: I’m going to continue to participate in the Hugo Awards by sharing awesome work, by being excited about cool stuff, by talking about cool stuff, and also by looking at and reading as much of the nominated work as I can. There’s some really good stuff nominated, even if I might not like exactly how some of it made it onto the ballot. I’m not going to burn it all because I don’t like  You can’t take the sky from me. I still love the Hugo Awards, even on days when I don’t necessarily like them all that much. That’s also what I do.

(12) A SINGAPORE FIRST. Benjamin Cheah, author of Flashpoint: Titan, comments on his nomination.

This nomination marks a milestone in Singapore literature. If my research is correct, this is the first time a Singaporean has been nominated as a finalist for the Hugo Awards. SFF is borderless, defined not by nationalities or arbitrary identity markers of writers or characters, but by its fearless exploration of technology, ideas and values. SFF, at its greatest, is an analysis, assessment, and affirmation of the human soul. I am proud to have played my part in growing this field, even if it were but a small role.

I acknowledge that the Hugos have been mired in controversy over the past few years. 2016 is no different. But no matter your position, if you are a voter, I ask only that judge each work on its own merits. Let the awards go to the most deserving, to the best and brightest in the field.

This is how we can make the Hugos great again.

(13) POETRY CORNER. Pixel Frost in a comment on File 770.

Whose bar this is I think I know
She’s on another planet though
And yet it can’t be sci-fi here
The bar’s a tavern, and there’s snow

The audience must think it queer
Despite AIs and starships here
This can’t be real SF, it’s fake
Because of snow. It’s very clear.

They give their puzzled heads a shake
And say there must be some mistake
The good reviews must make them weep
For purity of sci-fi’s sake.

But space is lovely dark and deep
And there are deadlines yet to keep
And chapters yet before I sleep
And chapters yet before I sleep

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Hampus Eckerman for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]

474 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 4/28/16 All My Hugos

  1. My favourite part of the Torling conspiracy theory is the idea that one of the most popular and commercially successful SFF publishers, and one that has a stable of popular authors, needs to go to the trouble of organising a secret slate just to get one or two works on the ballot.

    Actually, that’s not right. My favourite part of the theory is that they go to this expense and effort to promote books published by other companies. That part is genius.

  2. Yeah, my favorite part of the Torling conspiracy is how pathetic their results are. Makes me want to boycott Tor, just for being bad at conspiring to fix awards.

    After reading some of the “analysis” or “geekery” from some of the SP3 leaders (I can’t recall exactly what it was, but someone posted a “fun with numbers” kinda thing about Hugo stats), I have a pretty good idea what that analysis will be, regardless what the numbers are. I’ve never seen less mathy math geeks.

  3. @rob_matic: One truth is that whenever someone uses the term “Torling” in earnest, you can virtually guarantee that whatever comes next will be nonsensical babble.

  4. yeah, who know that Tor liked Orbit that much…?

    What, you didn’t know they were secret shareholders? *

    *Just in case there are humor impaired humans around, that was a joke.

  5. I’m imagining a Torling as some sort of baby Tor, but I’m not sure what that would look like. I wonder if they have feathers?

  6. @Cassy B

    yeah, who know that Tor liked Orbit that much…?

    Haha, yes, exactly! When I was looking into the “Tor controls the Hugos” claims, I ended up checking into whether Orbit was some kind of subsidiary or sub-brand of Tor. Why aren’t there claims of a conspiracy of Orbitals gaming the Hugo?

  7. Well, a tor is a rocky hill. So I guess a torling would be a small rock. Maybe a pebble.

  8. Aaron on May 9, 2016 at 12:28 pm said:

    To be honest, using the term “Torlings” pretty much demonstrates you to be a blithering fool,

    Really? So is everyone who refers to “Puppies” also a “blithering fool”?

    Torlings: PHN, TNH, various hangers on and lackeys. AKA “the Making Light crowd.” Congratulation, you’ve learned a new word today!

    On the ballots, however, in practice, achieving true anonymization is far more difficult than you seem to assume, but that’s not surprising considering how limited your intellect seems to be.

    Apparently your mind is so brilliantly superior that you could come up with that claim, w/o ever having to come up with a single example to support it. I am truly in awe of your great brilliance.

    Mere mortal that I am, I figured out that you could take everything that received 5 or fewer nominations, replace its name with a random identifier, and then send the data w/ that substitution.

    I also missed the part where the Hugo Administrators also swore they would never release any data about the nominations to unbiased observers unless they could guarantee absolute 100% anonymity. Could you point me to that notice?

  9. Really? So is everyone who refers to “Puppies” also a “blithering fool”?

    Puppies is a name that Corriea came up with to define his own group. It is the name Paulk and Beale currently use to identify their own supporters.

    Torlings: PHN, TNH, various hangers on and lackeys. AKA “the Making Light crowd.” Congratulation, you’ve learned a new word today!

    We know what it “means”. It is simply an idiotic appellation used by idiots. And your comments in this thread are prime examples of the phenomenon: Everything you’ve said thus far is nonsensical babble.

    Mere mortal that I am, I figured out that you could take everything that received 5 or fewer nominations, replace its name with a random identifier, and then send the data w/ that substitution.

    And that would be insufficient to fully anonymize the data. This has been gone over already ad nauseum.

    I also missed the part where the Hugo Administrators also swore they would never release any data about the nominations to unbiased observers unless they could guarantee absolute 100% anonymity.

    You know, most of the questions you have asked could be answered if you actually took the time to go and read the minutes of the 2015 Business Meeting. They are available for you to read. The fact that you have not done so speaks volumes about you.

  10. @SOon Lee: Thanks!

    (I did have to edit the curly quotes to straight quotes in Notepad–when I cut/pasted from above, it came through with curly quotes).

  11. Protest Manager seems to think that not paying attention to a subject is the equivalent of being an expert in that subject.

  12. Is this the same loser who keeps insisting over on GRRM’s blog that there’s been a Tor conspiracy? How do people this clueless manage to survive to adulthood?

  13. I was part of the discussions at Making Light & one of the eventual backers of “E pluribus Hugo”. A significant consideration was to keep discussions apolitical & focus on mitigating bloc-voting.

    I thought that those WSFS members who were Sad Puppies were just as much members of Worldcon & their nominations should be treated as equal of any other WSFS member. What needed fixing was the weakness that allowed any small bloc of nominators to dominate the final ballot, be they Sad Puppies or the alleged Tor-led cabal (of which no credible evidence has ever been put forth). I still think EPH is a good fix for that particular problem.

    But it has become obvious this year that the Rabid Puppies aren’t championing works that they think are undeservedly ignored, but are actively trying to wreck the Hugos. EPH isn’t sufficient against that type of attack, so I now think we need something more, like 3SV or DN, or something else similar.

  14. Soon Lee on May 9, 2016 at 3:29 pm said:

    But it has become obvious this year that the Rabid Puppies aren’t championing works that they think are undeservedly ignored, but are actively trying to wreck the Hugos. EPH isn’t sufficient against that type of attack, so I now think we need something more, like 3SV or DN, or something else similar.

    I don’t know, and won’t know until I see results from last year, whether or not EPH is sufficient. I agree the assholes are trying to destroy the Hugos. I just don’t have enough information yet as to whether we need more than EPH.

    So I’m reserving judgement on the necessity of other fixes until MACII releases the EPH results from last year.

  15. ULTRAGOTHA,
    For me, it’s the difference between NUTTY NUGGETS getting into the final ballot and this year’s Best Related Work category.

    I can live with NUTTY NUGGETS works ending up as Hugo finalist even though IMO it degrades the sense of “it’s an honor to make the finals”, because you could argue that tastes vary & enough members thought NUTTY NUGGETS was Hugo worthy (even if they were bloc-nominating members). I’m unwilling to live with Rabid Puppies slate works equating homosexuality with pedophilia on the final ballot.

  16. Aaron on May 9, 2016 at 12:14 pm said:

    push the Hugo Administrators to do what was promised last year at Sasquan, and release the anonymized Nomination ballots, to anyone and everyone

    That was never promised.

    To be fair, not that conspiracy theorists deserve it, one of the members of that year’s Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee, without having consulted the other members, said that they’d do so, in response to a request (not a demand) from the Business Meeting. As the Chairman of the meeting, and as the person who crafted the resolution at the request of the maker, I tried to make it as clear as possible that the Hugo Award Administrators were not obliged to honor this request. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not paying attention.

    Protest Manager on May 9, 2016 at 12:19 pm said:

    So you’re telling us you actually believe it’s not possible to anonymize the Hugo nomination ballots?

    1. The Hugo Award Administration Subcommittee was under no obligation whatsoever to honor the request of the WSFS Business Meeting. The Business Meeting could ask but has absolutely no power to compel the release of that data.

    2. The Hugo Administration Subcommittee, acting as a group, concluded that there was no way that they could release the information without potentially revealing confidential information about individual voters. You may disagree with their decision, but you have no way to override it. They are acting completely within the rules.

    Aaron on May 9, 2016 at 1:56 pm said:

    You know, most of the questions you have asked could be answered if you actually took the time to go and read the minutes of the 2015 Business Meeting. They are available for you to read. The fact that you have not done so speaks volumes about you.

    I’ll even help: The relevant portion of the discussion begins on page 49 of the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting Minutes. My statement that it’s a request, not a requirement, the debate on the point of order (raised by one of the administrators) that the motion wasn’t even permitted is included. (The chair’s opinion that the motion is legal sustained, but that doesn’t mean that the Administrators had to honor it). The wording from two members of the Committee suggesting that they would release the information is included. The decision post-convention to not do so after the full committee had an opportunity to do so and concluded that releasing raw data could potentially reveal how individual members voted is not included in the minutes because it happened after the convention. But in any event, it’s irrelevant; they were within their rights to deny the request on any grounds whatsoever.

    Anyone who wants to force future committees to release some sort of raw voter data should submit a constitutional amendment requiring it, but it will not be valid ex post facto.

  17. @kathodus @Cassy B @mark @rob_matic @cheryl S

    Sorry I’ve been away for so long, but I had to recover from the injury I did myself laughing so hard at what you all wrote

    1: How long did PNH spend whining about how he never gets a Hugo before his friends at the BusinessMeeting (who, of course, would NEVER hide data that makes him and his friends look bad) created the PNH Hugo Award?

    2: How many people besides PNH have won the “Best Editor, Long Form” Hugo? 1? How many years has someone other than PNH won it? 1?

    The Torlings go after Hugos with the obsession and desperation of a nouveau riche industrialist’s wife going after invites to Society events.

    3: Tor != Torlings. @Aaron claimed to know what Torlings were, but didn’t stop you from making idiots out of yourselves by your total failure to understand the Principal Agent problem.

    What do you think, is it because he’s a blowhard who claims to know everything? Or does he just enjoy laughing at you when you screw up?

  18. @Kevin

    2. The Hugo Administration Subcommittee, acting as a group, concluded that there was no way that they could release the information without potentially revealing confidential information about individual voters. You may disagree with their decision, but you have no way to override it. They are acting completely within the rules.

    1: A very strong heuristic: A group of people have the ability to release information that might make them look good, might make them look bad. They’re asked to release it, some of them say they’ll release it, but after reviewing the information they come up with an utterly BS excuse, and don’t release the information.

    –> The information makes the side they politically favor look bad.

    The fact that they did release the information to a Torling (who then bragged about it here on File 770), and to a friend of the NH’s, indicates their politics, and their dishonesty. Which is sad, because I used to like and respect several of the people on that Committee.

    So no, I cant override the decision. But I can draw reasonable inferences from it. And I will, and so will everyone else.

    2: Thanks for the link.

  19. While you’re here @Kevin, I thank you for providing whatever support you do to anyone pushing a semi-final round. And I invite you to observe who hates the idea, and what BS reasons they come up with for their opposition.

    If you want a virtually ungamable system, a 15 – 25 element semi-final round gives you that with no need for strategic voting, etc.

    But if you want to game it, if you want a “secret slate” to have a lot of power, a semi-final round is anathema.

  20. The Best Editor (Long Form) started in 2007, has been voted on nine times & it has been won by:
    Patrick Nielsen Hayden: 3
    David G. Hartwell: 2
    Lou Anders: 1
    Betsy Wollheim: 1
    Ginjer Buchanan: 1
    No Award: 1

    How many people besides PNH have won the “Best Editor, Long Form” Hugo? 1?

    Four.

    How many years has someone other than PNH won it? 1?

    Five.

    Arguing with fact-free points is a good way to get one’s name added to the File770 equivalent of a killfile.

    FYI:
    img[src*=”64864327e231bfd6007d9f0bfb1051ce”] + span::after, /* Protest Manager */

    [You might need to change the curly quotes to straight quotes; it’s a copy/paste artifact.]

  21. Protest Manager: How long did PNH spend whining about how he never gets a Hugo before his friends at the BusinessMeeting (who, of course, would NEVER hide data that makes him and his friends look bad) created the PNH Hugo Award?

    Where did PNH do that? Citations, please.

    Protest Manager: How many people besides PNH have won the “Best Editor, Long Form” Hugo? 1? How many years has someone other than PNH won it? 1?

     
    Still expecting other people to do your research for you, I see. Of the 8 Best Editor Long Form awards which have been given since the category was created, the winners are:
    3 – Patrick Neilsen Hayden
    2 – David G. Hartwell
    1 – Lou Anders
    1 – Betsy Wollheim
    1 – Ginjer Buchanan
    Every single one of these people has produced a deserving body of work for the year in which they received it. So now that you know the answer to your question, what’s your point?

     
    Protest Manager: The Torlings go after Hugos with the obsession and desperation of a nouveau riche industrialist’s wife going after invites to Society events.

    Torlings only exist in the fetid imagination of Puppies. Who are these Torlings? How are they manipulating the Hugo awards, and where is the evidence that such a thing is happening? You make yourself look like total moron when you make these ridiculous claims about your imaginary bogeymen. Are there also monsters hiding under your bed?

  22. You make yourself look like total moron when you make these ridiculous claims about your imaginary bogeymen.

    The problem that Protest Manager is having is that he simply hasn’t bothered to educate himself on the subject he is trying to opine upon. He clearly knows next to nothing about any aspect of the history of the Hugos, recent or otherwise. He’s just been wound up by people who range from ignorant to malicious who have fed him lies that he is now parroting. He would save himself a lot of time if he just put clown makeup on and posted a video of himself dancing to yakity-sax. That’s about how relevant and insightful his commentary has been thus far.

  23. I’ll just point to the obvious: This piñata might have a little candy left, but it’s stale. Possibly sticky. Certainly not delicious.

    And now I’ll go back to Torling central, where we’re constructing a secret slate that will defeat all attempts to defeat it.

  24. Mere mortal that I am, I figured out that you could take everything that received 5 or fewer nominations, replace its name with a random identifier, and then send the data w/ that substitution.

    “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, obvious – and wrong.”

  25. True Fact: I visited Patrick and Teresa’s house for New Year’s Day. When I got home:

    1. My cow would no longer give milk.
    2. My cow had never even existed.

    So don’t try to defend these people to me.

  26. The thing about Protest Manager is that he seems to think that his questions are somehow serious conundrums that everyone else will find difficult. As Soon Lee and JJ have pointed out, his question about PNH and the Long Form Editor category was pretty easy to answer. And there’s no excuse for Protest Manager not being able to find the answer, since it can be found on the internet quite easily, for example Locus keeps records on this sort of thing.

    But the truth is that Protest Manager doesn’t care about the truth. He just has an axe to grind and will make up bullshit to do so without any remorse. Now that his claim about PNH has been shown to be silly (and he has been asked for citations to support his claims), he will just ignore that he’s been caught lying and shift gears and come up with a different collection of invented outrages. He is just doing the usual Puppy dance of dodge, weave, evade, dissemble, and lie.

  27. Protest Manager on May 12, 2016 at 7:46 pm said:

    1: How long did PNH spend whining about how he never gets a Hugo before his friends at the Business Meeting (who, of course, would NEVER hide data that makes him and his friends look bad) created the PNH Hugo Award?

    I, personally, was part of the Hugo Awards Administration Subcommittee three times. This gave me personal access to the raw nominating and voting data. The most recent time, I was watching the electronic ballots as they came through. (In earlier years, most or all of the ballots came by paper so it was harder to go look at them.) I did not observe any patterns that would “make him and his friends look bad.”

    Answer yes or no: Are you accusing me, personally, of lying about the ballot information that I observed during my three times as a Hugo Award Administrator?

    I suspect that if you had been looking at ballots, you would have seen such a pattern, because you want to see a pattern. The actual ballots would have been irrelevant, given that you already know The Truth, and when reality disagrees with your conclusion, reality needs to be adjusted, right?

    I have long since had my fill of people massaging numbers to back-fill their conspiracy theories. In one case, they used the fact that two of their favorite whipping children had almost-identical nomination figures (one nomination difference between them), and therefore of course the Mighty Tor Empire had given Marching Orders to 85 people who all voted in lockstep. I pointed out that I nominated one of the works and not the other, and it was the opposite direction of the one-nomination difference actually observed. Therefore, their conclusion was mathematically disproved. But that meant nothing because of course they know The Truth.

    Protest Manager on May 12, 2016 at 7:53 pm said:

    after reviewing the information they come up with an utterly BS excuse,

    As it happens, one of the members of that committee did speak to me about how they determined the ability to see patterns in the data that would strongly indicate how individuals voted. No, I’m not going to tell you what it was, nor did they reveal any actual voter data to me. I see how they got to their conclusion, that’s all.

    So no, I cant override the decision. But I can draw reasonable inferences from it. And I will, and so will everyone else.

    In other words, the lack of evidence is evidence in favor of your conclusion, as long as it supports what you want to believe.

    You are of course welcome to introduce new rules to require that all raw data be given to you personally for you to personally manipulate for whatever purpose you want. Or maybe you could change the rules to prohibit the secret ballot and to require the release of every voter’s ballot, so you could start trying to intimidate people who disagree with you. But you would naturally have to get the other members of WSFS to agree to this change, due to that pesky thing called “democracy.” I know how inconvenient that is for you.

    Alternatively, you could bid for a Worldcon and appoint yourself Hugo Award Administrator. That of course would require you to convince the members of WSFS that you can be trusted to run a Worldcon. Good luck with that. But of course, democracy is dangerous, as you’re doubtless aware. I’m sure you think it much better for Protest Manager to be in charge and to Give Orders.

    Protest Manager on May 12, 2016 at 7:57 pm said:

    While you’re here @Kevin, I thank you for providing whatever support you do to anyone pushing a semi-final round. And I invite you to observe who hates the idea, and what BS reasons they come up with for their opposition.

    So far, my observation that most of the objections have been of of these classes:

    1. It makes a lot more work for the Administrators. (Corollary: We’ll not get people we can trust to do the work.)
    2. It requires people to vote negatively (3SV) which is mean
    3. It requires people to read all 15 semi-finalists (DN/AV) which is too much work
    4. It cuts 6-8 weeks out of an already relatively tight schedule

    None of these reasons sound like BS to me. They’re all quite reasonable. The question becomes whether any of these reasons is sufficient to block the proposal itself. Sometimes you have to take negative things to get positive ones, and in this case it comes down to WSFS members deciding collectively whether the positives outweigh the negatives.

    JJ on May 12, 2016 at 8:17 pm said:

    Protest Manager

    How long did PNH spend whining about how he never gets a Hugo before his friends at the Business Meeting (who, of course, would NEVER hide data that makes him and his friends look bad) created the PNH Hugo Award?

    Where did PNH do that? Citations, please.

    To be fair (not that PM’s charged language was), Patrick Nielsen Hayden (who as a member of WSFS has the same right to participate in WSFS business as any other attending member) spoke in favor of the initial passage of the split of the Best Editor category at the 2005 WSFS Business Meeting (see p. 9 of the linked minutes). Although there was a lot of technical debate on the subject, the vote was not close at all: 51-6.

    At the 2006 WSFS Business Meeting, Patrick also participated (again, as is his right like any other member), and spoke in favor of a provision that required that the split in the category be limited for only a few years unless re-ratified by the Business Meeting. (It was eventually re-ratified and made permanent.) He also spoke in favor of the ratification itself. The vote to ratify the proposal was by show of hands, meaning that the Chair (that was me) didn’t consider it close enough to count, and there was no call for a counted vote. While it wasn’t unanimous, it was sufficiently overwhelming that I don’t think it could be consider the work of a small cabal.

    Oh, and nothing Patrick said sounded like “whining” to me, either in 2005 when I was in the general meeting attendance or in 2006 when I was presiding.

    Further by the way: Just being a professional in the field doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to participate in the governance of WSFS like very other member. Other professionals have done so; George RR Martin spoke against the split in Best Dramatic Presentation back at Aussiecon Three, for instance.

  28. Basically, neither one of you has a defense of what PNH did to my cow.

    The cow deserved it. Fucking imaginary animals.

  29. @Jim: If you are coming to Balticon later this month, we can meet up and I’ll fix your imaginary cow with my magic powers.

  30. Aaron: @Jim: If you are coming to Balticon later this month, we can meet up and I’ll fix your imaginary cow with my magic powers.

    And I’m imagining this will be File 770’s first livestreamed event.

  31. Aaron on May 13, 2016 at 11:27 am said:
    Fucking imaginary animals.

    Hey! I think we’ve all had problems with Jim’s farm animals before but a blanket attack on all imaginary animals is taking things too far.

  32. Soon Lee on May 13, 2016 at 1:09 pm said:

    The cow was spherical and of uniform density.

    That’s just what they want you to believe! The cow landing was faked, man!

    Just like those awards that supposedly went to other editors than PNH. Everyone knows those were faked too, and PNH secretly won every time! 😀

  33. Hang on; I gave a spherical cow with uniform density to a physics-teacher friend of mine for Christmas a few years back. It must have been related to yours!

  34. Just like those awards that supposedly went to other editors than PNH. Everyone knows those were faked too, and PNH secretly won every time! ?

    PNH is really an alien. He’s able to change his looks and even split into multiple beings. All those other editors are just parts of PNH. It’s all so obvious if you just open your mind to the possibilities. What was that about a cow?

  35. The cow was purple. Everyone knows that, and Jim has offered no defense at all on that point. Instead, he tries to distract us with fake outrage over PNH’s entirely appropriate editing of the cow.

  36. @Soon Lee:

    Ancillary Patrick is the name of my next band.

    Ironically, PNH – who is a superb guitarist – and I have written songs together.

    This was before the cow thing, though.

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