109 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 8/11/17 “Scrollpathy for the Pixel” By The Scrolling Stones”

1. As I see it, we had two options:

   * Implement 3SV against bullet voting and introduce more politics into the Hugos and maybe cause campagning against items on the longlist.

   * Don’t introduce it and continue to damage the reputation of the Hugo’s everytime dinosaur p0rn is nominated.

   BM selected damage reputation instead of introducing more fan politics. None of the choices were good.

2. So, with Best Series here to stay, and the YA award added in, that’s quite a lot of reading next year. Can I encourage everyone to find us some really good trilogies next year?
   More seriously, I think I’m going to be aiming for series which are finished, or at least have hit a plateau where you can see the full scope. For example, the Vorkosigan series may or may not be completely finished – I don’t think Bujold plans to go back but she’s not ruling it out – but for the last few books you could say that the series was at a reasonable endpoint and you could judge it a worthy Best Series winner.

   (Another issue is that – iirc – the BM punted on the question of whether this year’s Series finalists were caught by the requirement to publish extra installments with a certain number of words to qualify for the new award – essentially, is a special category Hugo the same as a new Hugo with similar wording. I think at least three of this year’s finalists will be testing that rule)

3. @JJ
   If the Hugos are dead and WorldCon s dead and science fiction is dead, then I’m currently sitting in the middle of the zombie apocalypse at a very crowded WorldCon.

4. Whalefall was a thing of beauty.

   Yes, but if there is ever an Ursula Vernon award for some subset of literature or art, and the award trophy is a “snowglobe” containing tiny plastic bones and assorted unidentifiable grey chunks, it is her own darn fault.

5. @Camestros:

   Holy cow, that’s brilliant. Dare I say … H*g* W*rth*!

6. EPH has pretty much solved the slating problem …

   It doesn’t solve the intentional-insult problem or the libel problem. Theodore Beale or someone equally malicious may put whatever works on the Hugo ballot they desire, as long as they bloc-vote one or two works per category.

   The worthy writers who make a Hugo ballot will continue to see the value of their achievement degraded. The likes of Stix Hiscock and the bigoted anti-gay Moira Greyland essay are now an accepted part of the awards.

   I guess that’s OK with WorldCon, given the failure of 3SV. The griefers win.

7. A Meredith Moment:

   The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher is on sale at Amazon for $3.99.

   Here in 0323, the Goths are having a rough year and I’m hiding in a cave.

8. I notice some people whom I remember fondly when they were obnoxious right wing deplorables on Usenet popping up in Moshe Feder’s Hugo announcement to declare that the Hugos don’t count, the Hugos are governed by the Tor clique, the Hugos are sour anyway and DragonCon is much bigger anyway so there. I have suggested that the green alien lizard overlords have infiltrated Orbit as well but they didn’t seem to care about this serious threat to the purity of our bodily fluids.

9. Yay, I bumped into Paul Weimer, so now its only Red Wombat that I have missed. I think.

10. I saw her about ten metres from your exhibit.

11. I’ve seen Paul Weimer, but only from a distance. Haven’t spoken or introduced myself.

12. Dunno if this is recent or not but noticed earlier that the Kindle version All the Birds in the Sky was on Amazon UK for 99p though as this is posted from 5784 it may have expired.

    ETA All this talk of Whalefall makes me wonder if a bowl of petunias were mentioned as well.

13. There’s a whole lot of “I didn’t like it so nobody likes it” in that thread. The level of delusion displayed by that crowd is quite amazing.

    I’m always amused by the argument that fundamentally boils down to, “All the old Hugo winners are all-time classics, and now each one is some new thing I’ve not heard of!”

14. I am unimpressed by arguments claiming that EPH shut off the Puppies; Vox may have reported a change in tactics because he concluded his subjects were willing to fling poo (which is free) but not to drop another $40 to buy in. (No, I don’t think anything said by a Puppy can be reliably parsed.) Or has somebody been hiding their paratime traveler from the rest of us?

    I don’t think that identifying and mopping up Puppy poo would have taken anything like a campaign, but I don’t have the patience to wade through the meeting transcript to see whether there were more impressive arguments against 3SV; at this stage of my life I’m unlikely ever to be at another Worldcon business meeting. It will be interesting to see whether people get tired of random turds on the ballot in a few years, or learn to live with them like I live with the random trash dumped in my yard.

15. . Can I encourage everyone to find us some really good trilogies next year?

    *cough* A song of ice and fire*cough*

16. Peer: *cough* A song of ice and fire*cough*

    It would be ironic if GRRM, who has never won The Big One, succeeded in winning the Even Bigger One (Best Series).

17. *cough* A song of ice and fire*cough*

    Not going to be an issue next year.

18. I’m reading through the voting stats right now, and either I’m misunderstanding how they’re laid out, or there’s a mistake in Editor: Long Form. From the first table, it looks like Navah Wolf came in fourth and No Award took 5th place over Miriam Weinberg and Vox Day. But No Award only came in ahead of Vox Day, and Miriam Weinberg was fourth, ahead of Navah Wolf, who took 5th.

    Is it just that I’m confused by so many 5s (I have an SJW credential on my lap and another behind me – they are known to make 5s fuzzy)?

19. Chip Hitchcock: I am unimpressed by arguments claiming that EPH shut off the Puppies; Vox may have reported a change in tactics because he concluded his subjects were willing to fling poo (which is free) but not to drop another $40 to buy in.

    It’s wishful thinking to conclude that EPH shut down Vox Day. He still peppered this year’s ballot with his company’s books and assorted human shields. The voting report reveals how he could be more efficient and take up more of the ballot with a concerted effort of voters organized in echelons. I suppose this year he had to do as much as he did so nobody would think he’d lost interest, though I suspect his reduced push also sought a payoff by tempting those in the business meeting who have opposed rules changes to undo the work in progress.

    Really, it’s surprising to see people with many years of fannish experience convincing themselves that someone ever gets tired of carrying a grudge.

20. @Mike Glyer: Really, it’s surprising to see people with many years of fannish experience convincing themselves that someone ever gets tired of carrying a grudge.

    I came *this* close to spraying my tablet with protein shake.

21. @kathodus:

    You’re reading it wrong. The reason there are multiple tables is that, after the first-place winner is determined, that candidate is then removed from further consideration and the process is repeated to determine the subsequent winners. The other tables show those runs.

    In other words, Miriam didn’t finish below No Award – she was the second finalist to be eliminated when determining the winner of the category. When Liz won and was removed from the later runs, Miriam got above Noah and stayed there, ultimately finishing fourth.

22. @kathodus You’re only looking at the first pass of the first round. You need to look at the fifth round.

23. kathodus: I’m reading through the voting stats right now, and either I’m misunderstanding how they’re laid out, or there’s a mistake in Editor: Long Form. From the first table, it looks like Navah Wolf came in fourth and No Award took 5th place over Miriam Weinberg and Vox Day. But No Award only came in ahead of Vox Day, and Miriam Weinberg was fourth, ahead of Navah Wolf, who took 5th.

    The only thing you can tell from the first grid is who won. Once their name is eliminated from all the preference ranked votes, the tally is re-run (second grid) to determine second place. Same for 3rd, 4th, etc.

    The way the preference voting works, it would be theoretically be possible for someone to come in last on the first grid but still take second place, if they placed 2nd or 3rd on a lot of ballots but first on only a few, and the people who had more 1st place votes than they did were ranked in the bottom 2 or 3 on all the non-1st place ballots.

24. Okay, I get it now. I was looking at all the tables, but I was confused about the ordering – I thought they were listed based on the ultimate order, but they are listed based on that rounds order. This is patently obvious, but I’m fuzzy-headed this morning. Err… afternoon.

    ETA: Thanks, Reb. Bob, Greg, and JJ.

25. The arguments against 3SV seemed to come from two directions – the “too complicated and change is bad” view that also disliked EPH, and people who felt it went too far (e.g. potential for politicising things) when EPH was already in place. I think it got squeezed from both sides, and that plus uncertainty over whether the exact scheme proposed had the details right (e.g. there was some concern about the thresholds) meant it didn’t get enough traction.

    I don’t think EPH solves the slating problem in the sense of guaranteeing no slates again ever, but it does solve the sweeps problem quite handily. The big question is whether the ability to cheat one or two items into most categories is going to be a big enough ‘splash’ to motivate a group of griefers like the RP. It’s possible that it will be, especially with the marketing motivation, and if so we could get yet another two-year campaign.
    I don’t know where the proponents of 3SV are going to take it from here – possibly a revised proposal that accounts for the criticism it received?

26. @Mike Glyer: Really, it’s surprising to see people with many years of fannish experience convincing themselves that someone ever gets tired of carrying a grudge.

    Remarkable.

27. As a big ol’ extrovert (who happens to have been raised in fandom) I know a lot of people who aren’t hard-core SF fans. From my experience, the vast majority of these people, if they have any interest in the Hugos at all, are mainly interested in the winners. And they’re generally not that interested in the short fiction categories. These people are unlikely to ever hear the name Stix Hiscox.

    The ones with a little more interest, but who still fall short of being hard-core fans, have almost certainly heard of the Puppies, who have been widely reported about in non-SF-related news media. But the big swath of no-awards also made the news. They know we have a last-ditch defense against the trolls. And many of them know we’ve taken efforts to keep the trolls from sweeping the ballots in future. I don’t think they’re going to be outraged (or even surprised) to learn that trolls can get a Stix Hiscox on the ballot, but still can’t win the award.

    In short, I’m pretty sure the reputation of the Hugos will be largely unaffected by the occasional presence of a Hiscox on the ballot. Most people will remain blissfully unaware, and those who know enough to discover it are likely to know enough to recognize determined trolling.

    Now, looking at the nomination data, it appears that it took about 70 bullet votes to get a troll nom on the ballot. If I’m generous, and round that down to 50, that’s still a bunch of trolls donating $2500 to WSFS every two years, for the privilege of a minor troll which the overwhelming majority of people will never notice, and most of the remainder will quickly identify as yet more childish trolling.

    If the absence of 3SV means that WSFS continues to get that money from the trolls, I think we win! 😀

28. Hi all,

    I’ve discovered a limit to the number of WordPress threads you can be subscribed to, ~720. I haven’t been getting email notifications from the last few threads and eventually got curious enough to look at the WordPress subscription page, and there they were: four pending threads. But when I tried to approve them, nothing happened.

    It wasn’t until I unsubscribed from a few old threads that I could finally add the new ones. So I’m now going through and unsubscribing from old conversations. That’ll teach me to be lazy.

29. Hiscox is one thing, but what if there is a “XX is a rapist”? If so, I will never forgive the people that let that happen and the Hugos are over for me.

30. Annnd, of course I accidentally unfollowed the latest threads & have to ticky again….

31. What Xtifr said. I’m fairly unconcerned about the odd objectionable item getting on the nomination list. There are only limited numbers of folk who pay attention to it, and griefer items are easily discounted during the regular voting phase. We had some this year, and how much mental energy did we devote to Hiscox etc? Very little.

    If in future years a group of folk want to donate a few thousand dollars for the privilege of getting in the list and then being roundly ignored? Let them.

32. Hampus Eckerman on August 12, 2017 at 1:27 pm said:
    Hiscox is one thing, but what if there is a “XX is a rapist”? If so, I will never forgive the people that let that happen and the Hugos are over for me.

    I can imagine that scenario, and to me it would only demonstrate the patheticness of the authors and nominators concerned.

33. Really, it’s surprising to see people with many years of fannish experience convincing themselves that someone ever gets tired of carrying a grudge.

    Very true. Vox isn’t gone and neither have his grudges. What we don’t know is how he will express those grudges. John Scalzi, N.K.Jemisin and Patrick Nielsen Hayden will remain targets for Vox and he will find proxy arenas to make petty moves against them.

    But he is also lazy and keen to exploit those who will let him exploit them. As such *maybe* the Hugos are now more trouble than they are worth to him but we’ve no way of knowing.

    From the looks of the voting stats it appears that he has at MOST 50 people willing to vote for his nominees (58 for John C Wright). That is just on the threshold of having a possible impact with a bullet vote on the less popular categories. However, it is enough to get people on to a longlist. If his numbers are closer to being around 20 (as they were in the less popular categories) then he’s got no bullet voting power currently for 2018 but would still get some nominees on some longlists.

    I thought not enacting 3SV was the right decision and I think those numbers back that up. It would lower the threshold for some kind of griefing/trolling behavior at one stage of the vote. The damage to final vote would be substantially less but the nastiness might be higher.

    One change to 3SV could be to raise the bar higher for the longlist e.g. a longlist of nine would make it hard for somebody to easily get a work onto the longlist just for sake of trolling people voting in stage 1. I’m not sure that would be in the spirit of 3SV though and may have practical problems.

34. Hampus Eckerman on August 12, 2017 at 1:27 pm said:

    Hiscox is one thing, but what if there is a “XX is a rapist”? If so, I will never forgive the people that let that happen and the Hugos are over for me.

    But that’s exactly my worry about 3SV – the first stage becomes an easier target to get a defamatory title onto the longlist which then Hugo admins have to distribute to members and the troll who puts it there gets their jollies out of watching us all vote it off.

    Castalia House already has books with titles that are essentially troll moves (e.g. one featuring a certain German leader during WW2). Vox knows his books are never going to win anything, so what he wants is some way of creating fuss & angst. I don’t think 3SV stops that.

35. Soon Lee: I’ve discovered a limit to the number of WordPress threads you can be subscribed to… It wasn’t until I unsubscribed from a few old threads that I could finally add the new ones.

    Awhile back, when I discovered that I could automatically subscribe to all comments on all File 770 threads, I just did that. Yes, it tends to fill my inbox (especially during the last few days), but when I read a thread I can then just delete all the notifications for it en masse. (And it’s been helpful if I wanted to see the content of a comment which gets hit with the banhammer.)

    https://wordpress.com/following/manage

    This page can be used to add a site URL to your list (if it’s not already there), then click the settings gear icon and turn on notifications for each new post on the blog, and, if you desire, for each comment on each post.

    Now I no longer have to worry about godstalking threads, and get immediate notification even when a comment is posted on an older thread.

36. Camestros Felapton on August 12, 2017 at 2:06 pm said:
    …
    From the looks of the voting stats it appears that he has at MOST 50 people willing to vote for his nominees (58 for John C Wright). That is just on the threshold of having a possible impact with a bullet vote on the less popular categories. However, it is enough to get people on to a longlist. If his numbers are closer to being around 20 (as they were in the less popular categories) then he’s got no bullet voting power currently for 2018 but would still get some nominees on some longlists.

    The 58 votes for John C. Wright may also reflect the (to me unlikely, but people are strange) fact that JCW has legitimate fans of his own, independent of Vox Day’s efforts on his behalf..
    Untangle the Venn diagram for his nomination and you get the 20 Day hardcore minions, as seen in other categories, and a possible +/- 38 JCW fans.nominating their hearts.

37. @Cam: That… is a thing of beauty. Woo woo, woo woo. Although I think “should” ought to be “shout”. And letters page could be “lettercol” for that real old faanish feel. I sang it (badly) to Mr. lurkertype, who smiled, which is the equivalent of me going “Brilliant!” Put it on your blog so we can find it slightly easier.

    Oh geez, I’d already read all of this year’s serieses, so it was no problem. That means next year there’s gonna be a bunch of stuff I haven’t read. Well, let’s hope it’s mostly trilogies. I’m gonna put down Shattered Earth, we’ll all have read all that by then and it is objectively awesome.

    I didn’t like EPH+ or 3SV, so well done business meeting.

    Meredith Moment: in the US, “Neverwhere” by some dude yclept Gaiman is on sale for $1.99 on Amazon, B&N, and Google. Maybe other platforms and other countries, I dunno; check your local listings.

38. I found Camestros’ point about the griefers getting more exposure from 3SV, not less, persuasive. In addition, I agreed that it was better to let the current system work for a few years and see how it does rather than change things repeatedly, as long as we had a decent result this year, which we did.

    The 3SV sponsors fairly clearly were hoping it would replace EPH, not supplement it. 3SV is easier to describe, but adds a whole additional and untested stage to the procedures, besides making it easy for multiple griefer items to show up in the preliminary list.

    There is no perfect voting system. EPH seems to me to strike an appropriate compromise between slates and organized bullet voting. (One person bullet voting isn’t going to make a difference, so natural voters are still better off nominating all their favorites. Bullet voting only gains power when a group does it together – slate power turned on its head.)

    I hope I’m right about this.

39. Pingback: (Not Much) Sympathy for the Toxic Fan | Camestros Felapton

40. lurkertype: “I didn’t like EPH+ or 3SV, so well done business meeting.”

    Given EPH is already implemented & is working well, I wasn’t upset EPH+ didn’t pass.

    But I still think that something should be done to prevent the likes of Stix Hiscock, or worse, appearing in the final ballot. 3SV was deemed not good enough at the Business Meeting, so that is a problem that remains unresolved. Sure, we can vote such works below No Award, but they’ll still go into Hugo records as being a finalist, and that’s not good for the integrity of the awards.

    @JJ,
    “Awhile back, when I discovered that I could automatically subscribe to all comments on all File 770 threads, I just did that.”

    That’s exactly what I did too. But what I didn’t do was to unfollow threads once people stopped posting comments to them or when commenting was closed. Consequently, the number of threads I followed just kept mounting up until they hit the ~720 thread limit.

    PSA: So if you ticky to get follow-up comments by email, and the notification doesn’t arrive in your inbox as expected, it might be because you are at the limit of the number of WordPress threads you can follow. In which case, you’ll need to unfollow old threads at your WordPress subscription management dashboard to free up space.

41. Very true. Vox isn’t gone and neither have his grudges. What we don’t know is how he will express those grudges. John Scalzi, N.K.Jemisin and Patrick Nielsen Hayden will remain targets for Vox and he will find proxy arenas to make petty moves against them.

    But he is also lazy and keen to exploit those who will let him exploit them. As such *maybe* the Hugos are now more trouble than they are worth to him but we’ve no way of knowing.

    This. We shouldn’t underestimate Beale, but we shouldn’t overestimate him either. He’s just determined and nasty enough to do the simple nasty things he’s done, but I doubt he’s going to bother with anything more elaborate. (It’s worth noting that he chose close to the simplest possible course of action in his griefing this year, and presented it as a brilliant display of strategy to his minions.) So, if he strikes again, look for very simple plans. Or he might just give up, proclaiming he’s won, and move on to grief something else for a while. He has, believe it or not, done it before.

42. Hiscox is one thing, but what if there is a “XX is a rapist”?

    That was basically what the Eness pile of crap from last year was.

43. That was basically what the Eness pile of crap from last year was.

    That and giving the effing ghouls the chance to say that their enemies protected child molesters.

44. Soon Lee: That’s exactly what I did too. But what I didn’t do was to unfollow threads once people stopped posting comments to them or when commenting was closed. Consequently, the number of threads I followed just kept mounting up until they hit the ~720 thread limit.

    I don’t think you did the same thing. Because I don’t have any threads in my subscription list. I just have “File 770” the blog in my list, with “notify me of all new posts” set to Yes, and “notify me of all new comments” also set to Yes — and I never have to tick the godstalk box.

45. @JJ,

    Goes back to check, and you are right, I was wrong. I’ve now done what you suggested. Thanks.

46. Hey guys, I found my link to Survey Monkey my Dragon ballot in my Spam folder (Make your own joke). So you might want to check yours, esp. if you have a Yahoo address like I do. I guess the monkey goes to spam.

    Most helpful were (of course) File 770, Camestros, and Cora, who has her finger on the pulse of indie books.

    But it wasn’t that hard — I just voted for what I liked, not for what someone told me to… is that wrong for these awards? That’s wrong, huh.

    I don’t think 3SV was written properly. It looks like a great idea at first glance, but the more you look at it, it looks worse. I didn’t think we needed EPH+ either.

    Teddy’s already claiming victory again this year, with his worst result ever. Even though he TOTALLY doesn’t care. Maybe he’ll switch to the Dragons — the Dead Elk can participate there for free and self-published stuff does well there. Could pick up a lot of wins.

47. Steve Wright-

    I don’t think you can demoralize people who didn’t have morals to start with….

    Sure you can. Just say “no more ale for you.”

    rgl whooshing

48. If you keep them away from fungus, that should at least demorelize them.

49. There was my alternative to 3SV where you voted up instead of down. Will have to look at that again.

50. @lurkertype: can you be specific about devils in the 3SV details?

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