Pixel Scroll 7/6/19 Pixel First, Fix It In The Scroll

(1) DELANY ABOUT STONEWALL. Much about the country’s sexual history and his own informs “Stonewall, Before and After: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany” in the LA Review of Books.

…Years later, my mother and the downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Horn, whose kids had also gone to Camp Woodland, were talking about “The Jewel Box Revue,” which had returned to the Apollo Theater at 125th Street in New York. And my mother said, “You know, that’s Mary, that was Mary Davies, who was a counselor up at the summer camp.” And I realized I knew Stormé DeLarverie. And I suddenly realized this is not a person who is far away from me, this is somebody I sat next to on the piano bench, who helped me write a cantata and sat beside me at chorus rehearsal at Woodland — someone who had been very close to me.

Cut to Stonewall.

Stonewall happened when I was 27, so a decade later. And who was the person who was supposed to have thrown the first punch at Stonewall? Stormé DeLarverie!

(2) STAN LEE COMMEMORATIVE. Marvel Toy News doesn’t want you to miss this chance to spend your money: “Hot Toys Stan Lee GOTG Cameo Figure Up for Order!”

Just when it seemed as though the Toy Fair Exclusive Scarlet Spider sixth scale figure was a lock for “Fastest Hot Toys Sell-Out of 2019” after going to Wait List in under 12 hours, Hot Toys dropped a bombshell this week when they revealed an MMS that’s likely to blow poor Scarlet Spider’s sales out of the water! It’s so “out there” that many collectors never even considered it could happen, but the EXCLUSIVE Hot Toys Stan Lee in Spacesuit 1/6 figure is now up for order!

(3) WHERE THE FUR FLIES. Ursula Vernon reporting from the scene at Anthrocon. Thread starts here.

(4) THE GREAT FUR MIGRATION. “The origin of how Pittsburgh and furries fell in love with each other” is a fascinating article in the Pittsburgh City Paper.

…So, Anthrocon left Philadelphia and migrated to Pittsburgh in 2006. If there were any thoughts that the furries made the wrong choice, those were quickly assuaged the first day of the convention that year. People from Downtown restaurants, bars, and hotels all ascended to meet the furries at the convention center. [Sam Conway, the CEO of nonprofit Anthrocon] says they were there to welcome, greet, take pictures with, and even hug some of the furries.

“The city literally and figuratively ran out and gave us a hug,” says Conway.

Conway says Anthrocon and the furries have been in love with Pittsburgh ever since. He has been apologizing to Visit Pittsburgh for the last 14 years, saying he unfairly stereotyped the city of Pittsburgh. But he says that might have actually resonated stronger with furries, who have faced their own damaging stereotypes.

“Maybe that is why it resonated it,” says Conway. “We came here and realized, ‘Look at how wrong we were.’”

The TV coverage of this year’s con includes –

(5) ABOUT FANTASY. Well, when you put it that way —

(6) BERRY HARVEST TIME. John Scalzi probably doesn’t find these experiences funny, yet he is perfectly capable of treating them as the inspiration for amusing posts: “Endgames, Tinkerbell and Happily Ever After”.

In the wake of a recent mild uptick in people being angry at me for existing, a question in email, which I am paraphrasing for brevity:

What do you think these people are hoping for with these posts? What’s their endgame, and how do they think it will affect you?

…In the case of the alt-right dingleberry actively hoping for the collapse of traditional publishing (or at least Tor Books), which will presumably take me down with it: I think the plan there was reassuring the other dingleberries with whom he corresponds on social media that, yes, indeed, one day my virtue-signaling self will get mine, along with all of traditional publishing (or at least Tor Books), and what a glorious day that will be for them. As this particular alt-right dingleberry self-publishes on Amazon, there’s also the implication that upon the smoking ruins of traditional publishing (or at least Tor Books), and the dessicated bones of all the SJWs that toiled there, will come a new age where these alt-right dingleberries and their work will finally take their rightful place at the top of the science fictional heap, while I and my sort, I don’t know, maybe suck quarters out of vending machines to survive.

In case anybody cares which dingleberry is being discussed, in the Twitter thread version of this post, a redacted tweet could be traced to Brian Niemeier.

(7) SFF DISQUALIFIED AS LITERATURE? A long and interesting study of Ted Chiang’s fiction in the New York Review of Books: “Idea Man”. (Online version is behind a paywall.)

What fiction is made out of is a bit of a mystery, but an old bromide has it that ideas should not be a major component. T.S. Eliot praised Henry James for not having any in his fiction, which seems to accord with James’s own understanding of his work. “Nothing is my last word about anything,” he once wrote to a critic who had upset him by construing a particular portrait in one of his tales as a general statement. Along similar lines, George Orwell praised Charles Dickens for being “a free intelligence” who, in Orwell’s estimation, “has no constructive suggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong.” Ideas, by virtue of their abstractness, are deprecated as too smooth and clean, deficient in the loam of contradictory specifics from which rich fiction grows, and the wish to demonstrate an idea is seen as dangerous because it might lead a writer to neaten her picture of the world, and thereby falsify it.

Some kinds of ideas probably should be kept out of literature. It’s understandable, for example, that Orwell dismissed political dogmas as “smelly little orthodoxies,” and that he celebrated Dickens for writing novels that were innocent of them. But does it make sense to exclude ideas drawn from science or math?

The challenge of science fiction is in its embrace of them….

(8) PILGRIMAGE. NPR reminds us that Slaughterhouse-Five  was published 50 years ago.

When it was published 50 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” was an instant hit, an anti-war novel that was searing, satirical, strange and darkly funny. It revolves around a controversial moment in World War II, the firebombing of Nazi Germany’s loveliest city.

(9) PONSOT OBIT. The late Marie Ponsot is celebrated by Samuel R. Delany:

Marie Ponsot, one of my early mentors, has passed away, well into her 90s. She was 98. She was the dedicatee of my book ABOUT WRITING, and when I was sixteen, she gave me my first hardcover copy of NIGHTWOOD, a book I read more times than any other single novel and taught again and again. 

She was a kind, generous, and wonderful poet. Her first book was True Minds, and her second was Admit Impediment. She was the pocket poet who lived on this side of the country and had known Ferlinghetti in France. Her French was excellent. Her daughter Monique remains my face book friend, and her son Antoine was the dedicatee of my third novel, The Towers of Toron. Sometime later she was the traveling companions of my wife, Marilyn Hacker.

Learn more in the Wikipedia article about her: Marie Ponsot

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • July 6, 1990Jetsons: The Movie premiered in theatres.

(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • July 6, 1916 Donald R. Christensen. Animator, cartoonist, illustrator, writer. He worked briefly at Warner Bros. studio, primarily as a storyboard artist for Bob Clampett’s animation unit.  After that, he worked for Dell, Gold Key and Western Publishing comic books, as well as Hanna Barbera, Walter Lantz Productions and other cartoon studios. He wrote and provided illustrations for such comic book titles as Magnus, Robot Fighter, Donald Duck, and Uncle Scrooge. (Died 2006.)
  • July 6, 1927 Janet Leigh. Certainly best remembered as doomed Marion Crane in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. She would also be in with her daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, The Fog and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. She’s also in the Night of the Lepus, a very odd 70s SF film. (Died 2004.)
  • July 6, 1945 Rodney Matthews, 74. British illustrator and conceptual designer. Among his many endeavors was one with Michael Moorcock creating a series of 12 large posters that showed scenes from Moorcock’s ‘Eternal Champion’ series. This is turned became the Wizardry and Wild Romance calendar. He also worked work with Gerry Anderson on the Lavender Castle series. 
  • July 6, 1945 Burt Ward, 74. Robin in that Batman series. He reprised the role in voicing the character in The New Adventures of Batman and Legends of the Superheroes , and two recent films, Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders and Batman vs. Two-Face. The latter have the last work done by Adam West before his death. 
  • July 6, 1946 Sylvester Stallone, 73. Although I think Stallone made a far less than perfect Dredd, I think the look and feel of the first film was spot on for the film which was something the second film, which had a perfect Dredd in Keith Urban, utterly lacked. And Demolition Man and him as Sergeant John Spartan were just perfect. 
  • July 6, 1950 John Byrne, 69. A stellar comic book artist and writer. He’s done far too much to detail here so I’ll just single out that he scripted the first four issues of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, was the writer and artist on the excellent Blood of the Demon from 1-17 and responsible for Spider-Man: Chapter One which took a great deal of flak. 
  • July 6, 1980 Eva Green,39. First crosses our paths in Casino Royale asVesper Lynd followed by Serafina Pekkala in The Golden Compass, and then Angelique Bouchard Collins in Dark Shadows. Ava Lord in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (weird films are those) with a decided move sideways  into being Miss Alma Peregrine for Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. And she was Colette Marchant in Dumbo. She’s got two series roles to her credit, Morgan Pendragon in Camelot and Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful.

(12) MY ULTIMATE PURPOSE. Seeing this tweet, I’m reminded of Sirens of Titan and how the Tralfamadorians directed the development of humanity simply to produce a needed spare part for a spaceship.

(13) BLIND BARD. Get a head start celebrating Heinlein’s birthday tomorrow by listening to the X-Minus One radio broadcast of “The Green Hills of Earth”:

“The Green Hills Of Earth”. The story of Rhysling, the blind folksinger of the spaceways! Great radio. The script was previously used on “Dimension X” on June 10, 1950 and December 24, 1950. + This is the story of Riesling, the singer of the space ways. Future generations of school children have sung his songs in English, French or German, the language doesn’t matter, but it was an Earth tongue. But the real story of Rhysling is not found in the footnotes of a scholars critique or a publishers biography. It is in the memories of the old time space men the pioneers who pushed the thundering old fashioned rockets to the far strange ports that are our common place heritage – these men know the true story of Rhysling.

(14) AWARD KERFUFFLE. Amanda Marcotte points to Slate’s coverage of the Staunch Book Prize, “Why an Award for Books Without Violence Against Women Is So Controversial”. Thread starts here.

The Slate article begins –

An award exclusively for novels that do not depict violence against women has come under fire for the second year in a row. British author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless launched the Staunch Book Prize in 2018 specifically to recognize thrillers “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.” The prize drew controversy almost as soon as it was announced, with crime writers such as Val McDermid arguing that “not to write about [violence against women] is to pretend it’s not happening,” and CrimeFest, the Bristol-based festival for crime novelists, ultimately withdrawing its support.

Sophie Hannah, who writes psychological thrillers as well as the continuation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot mysteries, publicly announced that she would ask her publishers not to submit her books for the award. She also made the case in a lengthy Facebook post that the Staunch Book Prize muddies its message by taking an overt stand against one type of violence but not others: “If the Staunch Prize were to be awarded to a book in which a man is murdered, on the other hand, how could we avoid the conclusion that the prize, at worst, approves of this, or, at best, doesn’t disapprove of it all that much?”

(15) YOUR PLASTIC PAL. A BBC video reports “My date with a robot”:

In a place, like Japan, where workers are desperately needed, the government is hoping that robots could be the answer.

Some developers believe that instead of replacing us, robots could help get more people into work. But would you let a robot read you the news, look after your children, or even, take you on a date?

BBC’s Population Reporter Stephanie Hegarty went to Tokyo to meet them.

(16) A THOUSAND EYES. Funny bit about a peacock:

(17) NOT COMPETITION – ENVIRONMENT. “Amazon at 25: The story of a giant”

“There’s no guarantee that Amazon.com can be a successful company. What we’re trying to do is very complicated,” said Jeff Bezos in 1999, just five years after launching the online firm.

That the firm’s founder was so uncertain of its future seems surprising.

Today, 25 years on from when it started, Amazon is one of the most valuable public companies in the world, with Mr Bezos now the world’s richest man, thanks to his invention.

What started as an online book retailer has become a global giant, with membership subscriptions, physical stores, groceries for sale, its own smart devices and a delivery system which can get things to customers in just an hour.

So how has the Amazon empire been built?

(18) COUNTDOWN. BBC takes a look at “Apollo in 50 numbers: the technology”.

The Apollo programme pushed space and computing technology to its limit. Cutting edge at the time, some of the tech used seems alarmingly simple today.

74: Memory (ROM) of Apollo guidance computer, in kilobytes

Computer technology was one of the greatest – and long lasting – achievements of Apollo. From the solid-state microcomputer fitted to the lunar lander, to mighty IBM mainframes, with their flashing lights and banks of magnetic tape.

To navigate the Apollo spacecraft the quarter of a million or so miles to the Moon and then descend to a precise spot on the surface, astronauts used the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).

Housed in a box around the size of a small suitcase, with a separate display and input panel fitted to the main spacecraft console, it was a masterpiece of miniaturisation.

Developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the AGC was filled with thousands of integrated circuits, or silicon chips. Nasa’s order of this new technology led to the rapid expansion of Silicon Valley and accelerated the development of today’s computers.

(19) ON THE MOVE. In “Fairytales of Motion” on Vimeo, Alan Warburton explains how animators, with an emphasis on classic Disney films, use motion in their animation.

[Thanks to JJ, Chip Hitchcock, Carl Slaughter, Cat Eldridge, mlex, Martin Morse Wooster, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Paul Weimer.]

83 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/6/19 Pixel First, Fix It In The Scroll

  1. @Jon Bromfield
    You’ve now posted three comments pointing out how little you care about John Scalzi. Don’t you think that’s a little excessive for someone you supposedly don’t care about?

    14)
    I don’t have a problem with the existence of the Staunch Prize. And the issue that many British crime fiction writers took with the prize is not so much its existence, but that the organisers have basically accused crime fiction authors of indirectly influencing juries with their portrayals of sexual violence as something perpetrated by strangers and criminal masterminds and thus made it more difficult to secure rape convictions. And frankly, I can understand that the authors are pissed off, because that’s a nasty claim to make.

    Also, authors like Val McDermid and Sophie Hannah don’t even write the sort of lurid sexualised violence against women that the Staunch Prize condemns. In fact, Val McDermid was so annoyed that fictional serial killers inevitably murdered attractive young women in great and lurid detail that she wrote a crime thriller where a serial killer targets young men.

  2. Public service announcement: it’s spelled “y’all”, not “ya’ll”. It’s short for “you all”, so the apostrophe goes where the missing letters would have been. This is a very common error, and not very important in the scheme of things, but it annoys me.

    JJ, thanks for getting it right.

  3. @lenore
    I know that, and it annoys me to see “ya’ll” – I always want to ask them “y’all will what?” I saw “ya’ll” a lot while I was in Texas – they don’t seem teach grammar there, not even the regional dialect.

  4. @Lenore

    In my defence, that was actually a typo..! If one I admit I frequently make, sigh.

    @Jon

    So, no good books then. Well, we’ll definitely be feeling the loss of your nominating prowess come next year, given that you had zero books you felt worth recommending. Shame, thought you might have actually been a fan instead of a political culture warrior invading fannish spaces.

    (And seriously, dude, I don’t hang out on Puppy blogs posting my fantasies about Puppy authors’ “creative declines” or how I’m so happy, so so happy, look how happy and successful I am without them — you ever think that maybe your actions are why people think you have a thing about him and the Hugos? That maybe your actions show that you are not, in fact, over it? People who are over it don’t repeatedly, endlessly, over and over again, go into the hangout spots of people they dislike to proclaim how over it they are. Go and do something positive for your community instead. It’s just sad to watch someone do this.)

  5. @jon I certainly wouldn’t mind if my ‘creative decline’ led to multiple best sellers.

  6. I’m thinking that the correct usage would be “Y’all need to quit feeding the troll.”

    (Scalzi-stalk, as it were)

  7. Meredith, ha! I didn’t even notice you using the word. I was aiming my comment at our drive-by.

    That spelling is getting more common. Maybe it looks more balanced with the apostrophe in the middle. Or folks are influenced by the spelling of “ma’am” perhaps. Edit: and, as you say, it’s an easy typo.

    My pedantry attack has passed for the moment, so we return you now to your regularly scheduled programme.

  8. @Lenore Jones

    I did a quick self-search in a couple of venues and I’m certainly not noticing the typo as often as I should. (I am not the ideal person when it comes to proof-reading — unless I’m really concentrating I’ll mentally edit in the correct version without realising that the actual pixels are wrong most of the time.) I’ll try and keep more of an eye out for it since it bugs people. No promises though, I’m really not great at noticing some errors!

  9. So some Puppies, like me, do like to let ya’ll know we’re still here, fat and happy and gloating.

    You sound like a bitter ex drunk-texting his former partner at 2 a.m. to let her know how “happy and successful and completely over you” he is. There’s really no way to send that text without undercutting your premise.

    The Hugo Awards are thriving. We’ve spent hundreds of thousands of words here talking about great books and stories we discover as we prepare our nominations and votes. That has far more impact than drive-by nonsense comments from the burn-it-down crowd.

  10. 14) Looking at my reading history, zero of the last fifty books I’ve read would meet that criteria. I can see it working for literary books, but SFF and mystery have a high level of violence. To avoid injury to females, you would have to have no female characters.

  11. @Jon

    If you want to see our monument, look at the last few Hugo award ceremonies.

    Thank you so much for your efforts! I’m sure N.K. Jemisin and the rest of the widely publicized winners appreciate it.

    Seriously, dude, I don’t go on your blog (if you even have one–I have no idea, which is proof in itself that you don’t disturb my thoughts one little bit) to gloat or anything else. Just the fact of your surfing over here and taking time to type your tiresome screed refutes what you’re saying. If you were actually telling the truth, you wouldn’t even notice that John Scalzi had posted anything, and you certainly wouldn’t be dropping by here to say it. You do realize this site’s name is File 770, not Whatever? Why aren’t you on Scalzi’s site telling him how much you’re over him?

  12. Why aren’t you on Scalzi’s site telling him how much you’re over him?

    Scalzi has him in the timeout chair again after banning him multiple times in 2011 or thereabouts.

    He told him “go do your troll dance elsewhere” and we’re the elsewhere. Sigh.

  13. Sometimes, Jon, it’s NOT ABOUT YOU.

    Scalzi was talking about Brian Niemeier. Are you Brian Neimeier? Then he wasn’t talking about you, and you have no reason to bristle and huff and puff.

    Honestly, I’m reminded of the many times a person says, exasperated, “Dammit, it annoys me when men spread their legs so wide on the bus that they take up two seats for no reason.” and someone jumps in to say “But I, a man, never do that! I don’t even take the bus!”

    If you are not “A man who spreads his legs so wide on the bus he takes up two seats” you are not the kind of man discussed. The complaint is not directed at “a man, any man, anywhere, no matter what”.

    Although in this case there is an added factor where you are also proving your own claim not to be that kind of man by… being that kind of man. Kind of more like the guy who jumps in to say “I’m not that kind of man! When I spread my legs on the bus, it’s because it will annoy the SJWs.”

  14. @Soon Lee:

    Instead of “Pixel First, Fix It In The Scroll”, shouldn’t we “Pixel twice Scroll once”?

    Depends which kind of creative project you’re working on. I can’t figure out how to apply “measure twice cut once” to a novel. I also can’t figure out how to apply “write first, fix it in the edit” to woodworking though, so that’s fair. Which one applies to the development of Pixel Scrolls, I’m at even more of a loss to decide.

  15. bookworm1398 on July 8, 2019 at 7:37 am said:
    “but SFF and mystery have a high level of violence”

    I don’t think this has to be true–it’s just an unfortunate tendency of contemporary SFF.

  16. LOOK AT MY MONUMENT

    [looks sadly at empty awards bucket]

    YE SCALZY AND DISS CARE

  17. I’m going to give it one last shot and then I’m done with you boneheads. Until Scalzi broadcasts his paranoia again.

    Let me repeat and expand: The Puppies, Rabid and Sad, as a group, are no longer interested in John Scalzi. They don’t care whether he’s successful or not. Artistic quality is not always measured in commercial or popular success (see E.A. Poe and Jackie Collins). All the movement cared about was showing the Hugos to be the decadent tool of those more interested in pushing and rewarding a certain political/social agenda than entertaining stories. That much you know. That much we proved beyond any rational doubt. If you really think N.K. Jemisin’s work deserves three consecutive Best Novel Hugos or “Redshirts” was the best SF/Fantasy novel of its year, well, using one of Scalzi’s favorite forms of dismissal-sans-argument, God bless you, you’re adorable, but please stay away from the literary arts. You will only break things and hurt yourself.

    Now I have followed Scalzi’s career since a friend recommended “Old Man’s War.” I’m a hard SF guy so I found the science laughable, like most non-scientist writers’ stuff, but no big deal if the story is engaging. It wasn’t, and having read most of Heinlein I realized at once it was a rip-off of the master. But it was a well written rip-off, the prose clear and unaffected, unlike a lot of the artsy-fartsy stuff beginning to stink up the genre (see Swirsky, R.). And I had to admire Scalzi’s brilliant end run via the internet around the establishment publishing houses. I never did finish “Old Man’s War,” finding it too jejune to waste more time on, but I thought, Hey, this is the guy’s first novel. He’ll get better.

    He never has. He remains what he’s always been, an unoriginal middling writer who has become successful though good marketing and even better sucking up skills. I soon realized what I was seeing was the SF equivalent of Peter Keating, Ayn Rand’s architect mediocrity in “The Fountainhead” who, like Scalzi, achieved monetary and popular success by copying the works of past masters at a time of creative turgidity.

    I admit I find his public persona revoltingly fascinating, a bizarre cross between buffoon and worm. I also confess I like turning over rocks to see what’s squirming underneath.

    So I drop in on Scalzi occasionally because I’m curious as to how long he’s going to get away with it.

    Not much longer, I suspect.

  18. @Lenora Rose ,
    Oooh, interesting comment. my thinking was all over the place with that and also included computer games or software that is buggy on release & (if you’re lucky) eventually fixed with updates & patches.

  19. @leonora. @soonlee That would be the alternative sort of approach, indeed. I was thinking of photography, particularly. But there are merits to taking fewer, better pictures and trying to get it right “in the camera” the first time.

  20. Jon Bromfield : “I’m going to give it one last shot and then I’m done with you boneheads”

    I’ve never had the chance to cosplay as a Minbari, sad to say.

  21. @Paul,

    Current day photography is a very different beast. With digital cameras, you can take as many shots as you like and delete the ones you don’t want. On one hand, it’s so much easier to take photos (not need to pay for film, no need to wait to develop photos), but each photo may not get as much care in composition as used to happen when you only had 24 or 36 shots in a roll of film (and so had to make them count).

  22. Jon Bromfield: Let me repeat and expand: The Puppies, Rabid and Sad, as a group, are no longer interested in John Scalzi.

    Where you immediately go off the rails is claiming these are groups any longer. Where are they? Who is out there addressing himself as a Sad Puppy — you, Declan Finn (who Sarah Hoyt told to stop doing it!), three or four other people? There weren’t enough followers to keep Sad Puppies 4 afloat and the brand has never been heard from again.

    The people who line up to let Vox Day tell them what to do now go by other identities.

    So all we really know is that Jon Bromfield can’t stop talking about Scalzi.

  23. @jon It doesn’t help your look that you keep switching directions more often than the wind in the Wizard of Oz. You stick to Corriea’s perv-fantasy gun porn. The rest of us have higher aspirations.

  24. Jon Bromfield on July 8, 2019 at 12:14 pm said:

    I’m going to give it one last shot and then I’m done with you boneheads. Until Scalzi broadcasts his paranoia again.

    Let me repeat and expand: The Puppies, Rabid and Sad, as a group, are no longer interested in John Scalzi.

    Using Google to search for distinct posts in which “Scalzi”* is mentioned at Vox Day’s blog (in the post or comments) gives me TWELVE distinct hits for the past year. That’s quite a lot if the Rabids are no longer interested in him.

    Mad Genius Club is less Scalzi focused with three such hits but I’ve double checked and three isn’t zero. Kudos to Sarah Hoyt for only scoring one and good old Larry manages three on his blog. And those are just were he is named DIRECTLY rather than in the more don’t-mention-voldermort style of referencing others we see in those blogs.

    Factually, your claim is not true. Oh, I don’t doubt ex-Pups are trying to move on, they just aren’t doing it very well and we know why: they still have yet to be honest with themselves about what went down during the Debarkle. They still haven’t dealt with the mismatch with what they claimed and what actually happened…hence the ongoing revisions of history.

  25. Jon: Scalzi Scalzi Hugos Scalzi Hugos Scalzi Scalzi.
    Also Jon: Obviously I don’t care about Scalzi and the Hugos.

    Hmmm. Actions, words, speaks louder, etc.

    Still no book recs, either. Well, I shall do my own:

    If any of you are currently in the market for fantasy with fluffy wlw romance, Effie Calvin has a quite charming series on the go which starts with The Queen of Ieflaria. The characters in the first two books are well-drawn and likeable, it sells the romances well, and there’s a third one recently out which I haven’t got around to reading yet (Hugo season, you know how it is) but I’m very much looking forward to. It also has dragons! and some very pleasing stuff about gods and what they stand for and how that works to shape them as people! They’re fun, charming, relaxing reads which execute their world-building reasonably well and which guarantee a happy ending. Which is sometimes exactly what I want.

    (She writes at a fair clip, too — the fourth one is planned for a December release which would make it four books in two years. Plans for two more after that.)

  26. John Scalzi, Hugos, N.K. Jemisin, Redshirts, Rachel Swirsky, we just want entertaining fiction, we totally don’t care about you.

    And, ladies and gentleman, we have the full bingo card here.

  27. @Jon

    So I drop in on Scalzi occasionally because I’m curious as to how long he’s going to get away with it.

    Not much longer, I suspect.

    Well, gee whiz, this is the same thing you were saying in 2011! Or, hell, when Old Man’s War came out!

    A prophet you are not.

    @Cora

    And, ladies and gentleman, we have the full bingo card here.

    And it only took him, what? Five comments? Fastest cliche-spouter ever.

  28. You know, before the Sad Puppies shenanigans, I think the only writers I followed on Twitter were Neil Gaiman and Wil Wheaton. Since then (and thanks in part to Wheaton and Gaiman RTing people, which then led me to other people) I’ve started following/reading Scalzi, Mary Robinette Kowal, File770, GRRM’s blog, NK Jemisin, Rivers Solomon, plus probably a few others that I’m forgetting right now. I’m not a voting member of the Hugos yet but maybe someday.

    So, good job, Puppies. Thanks for showing me everything I was missing.

  29. And, ladies and gentleman, we have the full bingo card here.

    LOL. Bromfield did a good job of demonstrating that all he knows about the Hugo Awards are the same tired attacks that Beale and the other puppies parrot to each other. Many of them have stopped talking about the awards so he’s run out of material.

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