312 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/15/16 Scroll On the Water, Pixels In The Sky”

1. Not one that I ever saw – not one – suggested voting for Jemisin as a way to spite the Puppies. The only suggestions I saw that anyone might do that came from the Puppy side itself.

   But don’t the media article since the win suggest that? Here’s the Guardian, for example: “The winners of the 2016 Hugo awards have been announced, with this year’s choices signalling a resounding defeat for the so-called “Puppies” campaigns …” And here’s Slate: “Saturday night’s 2016 Hugo Awards ceremony was once again the site of a proxy battle between a group of activists led by white nationalist and misogynist Theodore Beale and his followers and, well, the rest of the world.”

   By casting this as a political battle, aren’t they actually demeaning the winners? Suggesting they won for political reasons rather than on the basis of quality?

2. @snowcrash: given the very little I know of Kowal, I think it’s possible she brought one to use and one to lend for someone else’s emergency. Or maybe she just has one for her gadgets in her room and another that she can carry to panels for random need; hotel outlets are usually in awkward places, so not having to unplug and replug the in-room strip could win.

   @JJ: I think Lovell is stretching. (Not completely wrong — although citing problems with long-dead people as part of a critique of current issues is debatable.) I’d particularly like to know whether she read the works referenced by her Tiptree cites rather than just the summaries cited, as I was around then and don’t remember Tiptree’s popularity dropping. I do remember many people laughing at Silverberg, who IIRC never walked back his remark about T’s writing being “ineluctably masculine”, and a novel that wasn’t very good (hardly surprising on a first try — the people who insist that new writers should “hone their craft” on short works forget how radically different a novel is). I know too much of her work to judge abstractly, but I’d love to see the results of a blind test of reactions to work from before and after the reveal; some people just don’t sustain their energy forever (and Sheldon had her own years and her husband’s advancing debility to cope with), but I wouldn’t claim this was true of her.

   @Standback: You may argue that government is [merely] an institution and the conservative movement is people. As a local law school professor used to say, you may argue that grass is blue and the Pope’s a Jew. Or you might consider Lincoln’s proverb of the 5-legged dog. Your attempt to compare treatment of a category of people (“smokers”) with treatment of a movement is … debatable.

3. Lela E. Buis: I’d say you’re confusing observations on results (by outside organizations looking for hooks for stories) with advance reasoning, but we’ve been through all this before, so I’ll call your arguments untruthful rhetoric instead.

4. That should have been prefaced with “Apologies to Robert Frost,” of course.

5. In only vaguely SF-related news, today I rescued a pathetically squeaking hummingbird from the web of a spider that may have weighed more than the bird. From now on, I will imagine Shelob as an oversized black-and-yellow argiope.

6. @Lela E. Buis,

   Not one that I ever saw – not one – suggested voting for Jemisin as a way to spite the Puppies. The only suggestions I saw that anyone might do that came from the Puppy side itself.
   

   But don’t the media article since the win suggest that? Here’s the Guardian, for example: “The winners of the 2016 Hugo awards have been announced, with this year’s choices signalling a resounding defeat for the so-called “Puppies” campaigns …” And here’s Slate: “Saturday night’s 2016 Hugo Awards ceremony was once again the site of a proxy battle between a group of activists led by white nationalist and misogynist Theodore Beale and his followers and, well, the rest of the world.”

   By casting this as a political battle, aren’t they actually demeaning the winners? Suggesting they won for political reasons rather than on the basis of quality?

   I think you’re misreading those quotes.

   The only thing that the media is pointing out that there exist political campaigns – the Puppies – and that those political campaigns failed to win.

   They do not in any way suggest that the Puppies’ campaigns lost against a political opponent. In fact, as the Slate quote suggests, it’s seen as a political campaign (Puppies) vs “the rest of the world” – i,.e., not a political campaign.

   What those quotes show is that the winners won not because of politics, but in spite of an attempt to politicize the Hugos: The only ones who are being political are the Puppies. The “rest of the world” just vote for the works that they enjoyed and preferred.

7. But don’t the media article since the win suggest that?

   Only if you assume the Hugo voters didn’t vote for the things they actually like. That’s a common assumption voiced among Puppies, but there is no evidence that it is true, and a fair amount of evidence that it is not. Why have you latched onto a false narrative like that?

8. @ Lela:

   But don’t the media article since the win suggest that?

   No, they don’t. The articles you quoted said that the Hugo results were a blow to the Puppies, but that’s the “what” part of the five Ws rather than the “why” part. A post-mortem discussion of the impact of a vote doesn’t imply any particular reason on the part of the voters.

9. BTW, for those with Puppy fatigue, I’ve got a new story up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

10. Anyone read Necrotech? Pretty interesting book. Lots of neat swearing.

11. Only if you assume the Hugo voters didn’t vote for the things they actually like. That’s a common assumption voiced among Puppies, but there is no evidence that it is true, and a fair amount of evidence that it is not. Why have you latched onto a false narrative like that?

    I think it’s implicit in the assumptions the media writers make, which are then accepted by their readership. Here’s Slate, pointing out the political basis of the 2015 results: “When the pups positioned their nominees as a rebuke to the women, people of color, and LBGTQ folks seeking a place in the science-fiction/fantasy world, that coalition struck back. Voters opted to give “no award” in the five categories wholly overtaken by puppy nominees.”

12. who IIRC never walked back his remark about T’s writing being “ineluctably masculine”

    The second edition of Warm Worlds and Otherwise adds a postscript to the “ineluctably masculine” essay, which I’d call a walkback — quoted here, along with some later reflections by Silverberg (apologies for horrible link):

    https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HZ8BAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT188&lpg=PT188&dq=silverberg+fooled+me+beautifully&source=bl&ots=041ZnaWhDm&sig=6zsMTAO14h1YxaV16DOlKEnEXXc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj4s46K-ZPPAhXrAsAKHaSHAhkQ6AEIKTAE#v=onepage&q=silverberg%20fooled%20me%20beautifully&f=false

13. BTW, for those with Puppy fatigue, I’ve got a new story up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

    Thanks, Jonathan. Will check it out. I’ve got a new one up at PerihelionSF.

14. Lela E. Buis on September 16, 2016 at 5:41 am said:

    But don’t the media article since the win suggest that? Here’s the Guardian, for example: “The winners of the 2016 Hugo awards have been announced, with this year’s choices signalling a resounding defeat for the so-called “Puppies” campaigns …” And here’s Slate: “Saturday night’s 2016 Hugo Awards ceremony was once again the site of a proxy battle between a group of activists led by white nationalist and misogynist Theodore Beale and his followers and, well, the rest of the world.”

    By casting this as a political battle, aren’t they actually demeaning the winners? Suggesting they won for political reasons rather than on the basis of quality?

    This may surprise you, but not all of us regard the Guardian as particularly authoritative, especially when it comes to SFF fandom.

15. It’s hard not to think people claiming women and PoC win awards because of politics aren’t sexist and racist.

16. Lela E. Buis:

    “By casting this as a political battle, aren’t they actually demeaning the winners? Suggesting they won for political reasons rather than on the basis of quality?”

    If they suggest that political reasons are the only reason the winner was voted for then yes, they are demeaning the winners. If they instead praise that diverse authors aren’t thrown out because of differing from the norm then no, they aren’t.

17. @Lela: And yet it could be reasoned that the execrable dreck forced onto the ballots by the Puppies’ political mischief was No Awarded on the grounds that it was execrable dreck. Further proven by the fact that Puppy picks this year (you know, the ones held hostage by your good friend Theodore) actually went on to win in some categories. It’s as if Hugo voters don’t give a fuck about the political battle that Ted and the Elk are waging and would rather see awards go to good work.

18. @John:

    I’m afraid I might be about to ruin that apology, because if I had a forced binary choice between ending government and ending conservatism

    My apologies; I had absolutely no intention of suggesting such a choice. Did it come across as though I were saying that?

    @All: Let me be clear: I’m not defending the original phrasing at all. I agree that it’s horrible. I can see various reasons why people would think it’s OK and defend it; ways that they’d argue that drowning people is a misreading; and to them I would say: OK, that’s nice, but how about choosing phrasing that can’t be trivially misread.

    Which is what I was trying to say re: John as well. But I see that I didn’t stop there; I accused John of saying something “worse” (which is a pointless, unhelpful thing to argue over), and went and embroiled myself in probably the exact same argument about the statement that’s been playing since 2002. That was poor of me; I should have noticed that that was what I was doing. My apologies.

19. I think it’s implicit in the assumptions the media writers make, which are then accepted by their readership.

    You only think that because you decided ahead of time that that was what was happening. There’s nothing in the actual text of the articles that suggests it.

    Here’s Slate, pointing out the political basis of the 2015 results: “When the pups positioned their nominees as a rebuke to the women, people of color, and LBGTQ folks seeking a place in the science-fiction/fantasy world, that coalition struck back. Voters opted to give “no award” in the five categories wholly overtaken by puppy nominees.”

    That doesn’t say that the choice was political at all. It says that the Pups started a political campaign, and it failed to convince voters to choose their politically-driven choices. That actually shows the voters rejecting politically-motivated voting. You’ve bought into the lie that because the Puppies have made their choices based upon politics, the choices made by the remaining Hugo voters is all about their politics as well. One has to wonder why you have decided to buy into this lie. Are you duplicitous or are you merely gullible?

20. @Standback: Thanks. I wasn’t offended. I just wanted to be clear about the bad choice among bad choices I would, probably badly, choose, if push came to shove. I take your point about violent language. We live in violent times, though, and the language is among the least, I think, of our worries.

21. For the curious the gravatar ID for Lela Bulis is “6615c7c08c7e92a4b747826e0ac34205”
    Plonk!

    See also http://realtegan.blogspot.com/p/file770-stuff.html

22. Cheap Ebook Alert:

    Jo Clayton’s “Diadem From The Stars” (first in the Diadem series) is on sale for $1.99 at Amazon, Nook, iTunes, Kobo, and Google.

23. @Buis: ummm, so that means that every stupid, ridiculous, detrimental and unconstitutional proposal ever put forth in the US was defeated by a coordinated effort?

    Or could it be that most people recognized those bad ideas for what they were and voted simply based on their native intellect and personal recognizance?

    You all seem to need to perpetuate this us vs them myth. The first mistake the puppies made was in setting themselves apart from the rest of fandom. The reality is, there’s puppies, and then there is EVERYONE else. Sometimes, when you find yourself in disagreement with EVERYONE else, it’s because your position is the outlier, not because there is a vast conspiracy.

    It’s almost as simple as you staging that 2+2 = 5 (yay fifth!) and everyone else disagreeing with you, because several thousand years ago some Arab mathematician decided to foist a hoax on the world and everyone else has been going along with it for thousands of years.

    You are wrong or there is a conspiracy by the majority against you.

    Conspiracies are convenient; they give you an excuse to hold on to your mistaken beliefs.

24. I’ve not enjoyed most Hugo winners in recent decades. But I think that the Hugo voters this year made a good faith effort on the whole to assess the nominees on the basis of how much they liked them. If Aeronaut had finished below no award I would not have this opinion.

    The Guardian, Slate and other leftist publications did present the entire Hugo process as a political fight. Entertainment Weekly’s take last year was so laughable that the story was retracted. But angry complaints that both leftist publications and rightest publications (see Breitbart) did not look at the winners and the nominees as pure political gamesmanship is ignoring reality.

    BTW – few of you seem to have any understanding of conservatives, conservative or libertarian thought at all. As a group the 770s view of conservatives is laughable.

    Let me give you an example. Obama and Clinton both proclaimed loudly and often that toppling middle east dictatorships was a bad thing. That bad things result when the US and the West topple middle east dictatorships. Then Obama & Clinton launch a war against Libya, without Congressional approval, and topple that dictatorship. And bad things have happened in Libya. Obama and Clinton were even worse than GWB because they had the example of recent history and they did not even attempt to gain approval of Congress. Many conservatives and all libertarians were against the Libya adventure. But where was the liberal outrage?

25. The Guardian, Slate and other leftist publications did present the entire Hugo process as a political fight. Entertainment Weekly’s take last year was so laughable that the story was retracted. But angry complaints that both leftist publications and rightest publications (see Breitbart) did not look at the winners and the nominees as pure political gamesmanship is ignoring reality.

    Thanks for pointing this out. If the issues were quality or readership of the awarded works, then there would be more discussion of that in the articles and less about how the opposing political views are demonstrated in the voting.

    I read and reviewed all the nominees for my blog this year, and I thought some of the Puppy picks had strong potential as winners. This did confuse the political issue, and the Sad Puppies scored several wins, but the Rabid Puppies only scored with “Folding Beijing.” This suggests the voting was aimed at chastising Vox Day.

26. This did confuse the political issue, and the Sad Puppies scored several wins, but the Rabid Puppies only scored with “Folding Beijing.” This suggests the voting was aimed at chastising Vox Day.
    

    Yeah, that doesn’t flow logically at all. It shows that Teddy doesn’t know shit about the Hugo voters and didn’t put work on the ballot that would entice them to vote for it.

27. A few thoughts on the issue of “politics” vs. “literature” (as if the two discourses are completely separate and have nothing to do with each other!), riffing off the discussion about the Paulk comments here, but not meant to respond only to Paulk (it’s quite legitimate to decide you hate a work so much you won’t finish it, and even to write about that response–but only certain kinds of arguments are possible with that approach, well, credible to other readers who don’t share your personal experience that leads you to the dislike of the work and the legitimate decision not to read any more)

    I voted for Jemisin’s novel as first in the category (with Leckie’s AM second). Was my vote because of my politics as a long-term SJW (the first *click* moment that moved me from unthinking acceptance of my family’s Republican politics was reading about the
    Kent State shootings when I was fifteen years old, and thinking, because this was only the first moment of political awakening, “my government is killing people like me.”) The more I read and thought and observed through the following decades, the more radical I got. So, yes, politics.

    More recent politics: I first “met” Nora (online) as a participant in Racefail ’09 (before her first novel was published). Her writing was fantastic, and she talked about her short stories and novel in progress. I looked for that novel because I knew her writing, and loved it. (I taught it in a class). I have read every other novel she wrote the moment she came out and loved them, and think that TFS, and the series in general, is a major huge leap forward for her in terms of craft, technique, and subject matter. I taught TFS last spring in a “marginalized literatures” graduate course, and am teaching if this fall in an undergraduate African-American literature course (with the theme of Afrofuturism). Now, some people might say, look SPECIAL courses, affirmative action, politics, blah blah blah. These courses exist (like the Women Writers course I also teach) *because* the canonical literature courses up until the 1970s (when those courses were started) politically, purposefully, and reflecting the racism of US culture and US institutions of higher education excluded literary works by people of color (and when the Women Writers courses were first set up, they mostly focused on Anglo American women’s literature). Now, many of the “standard” courses (American literature survey, Children’s literature) in my department routinely include works by authors of color, but the theme/specialized courses still serve a focus. (How many times have *generic you* been in a college course that taught ONLY women authors [multi-ethnic and including lesbian and queer women authors, often to my students’ disgust–just read an evaluation on one of my courses about how I always teach “feminism and lesbianism and all that crap”], or ONLY African-American authors?)

    I’m still working on formulating my ideas about Jemisin’s work (and I plan to write an essay about the series as soon as it’s finished–I’m currently working on one about the queer phenomenology of Leckie’s worldbuilding) in regard to its structure and aesthetics, but here are some of my current thoughts.

    Thematically, I think of it as a hybrid and speculative work developing themes also explored in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Omelas,” Langston Hughes’ “Harlem” poem (specifically the “dreams deferred stanza”), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved). (I know from something Jemisin said in a Facebook post that she has not read that Morrison but has read others, but that’s OK, I’m not saying she was influenced, but that she’s dealing with similar themes.)

    Structurally: I see is a a novel that brilliantly Signifies (in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s meaning of the work in his literary theory) upon the narrative conventions of the epic.

    The Fifth Season begins in medias res, and is also “grand in scope,” has major deeds “valor and courage,” and there are “supernatural forces” involved affecting human beings. *BUT* the novel is also a stylistic tour de force in terms of her use of vernacular (the use of second person narrative which is a characteristic of informal style), the fact that the protagonist is a woman, a mother, whose epic quest is to save her daughter (and I’m still WOWED by what happens in The Obelisk Gate, but right now, keeping focus on TFS). Essun is *not* a patriarchal/conventional/traditonal epic hero, and that’s part of the Signifying. (In fact, now that I think about it, I’ll have to add Tepper’s Grass which I see an an epic feminist revision of Dune to my list of similar themes, along with Le Guin, Hughes, and Morrison).

    The beginning sequence: I adore it, and think it’s brilliantly structured (and deconstructs the epic convention of in medias res) in part because of the “personal ending,” Essun grieving over Uche’s death (the line “”She will cover Uche’s broken little body with a blanket–except his face, because he is afraid of the dark” brings me to tears every.single.time. I read it.). Essun is so devastated by her loss (not her first, one of many–and the significance of THAT only comes clear later on) that she doesn’t care about the “continental” ending of the world. I tend to agree with her.

    So much is so incredibly and subtly done in that opening (the first time I read it, I was a bit confused, but I didn’t care–I wanted to find out *what* happened to bring the narrative to that point, just like when I first read Octavia Butler’s Kindred which starts with the narrator telling us that the last time she came home, she lost her arm!!!!! and had to keep reading to find out what happened) and the minute I finished the book, I went back and re-read the opening and went OMG, yes, of course, OMG this is so incredible, ACK, when is the next one coming out.

    I see *so much* going on in the series–thinking about it in the context of the genre of the epic, the genre of science fiction (and I do tend to see it a bit more in the mode of science fiction in that I read the orogenes’ capabilities as being ‘explained’ by brain structure rather than ‘magic,’ as being ‘natural’ in the world, though I can also see the argument for fantasy/fantastic) and the sub-genres of apocalyptic science fiction, feminist science fiction, and in the context of African American literature (especially Afrofuturism). But I *see* that in the text because I have read in all those genres and have thought about these issues as a reader (starting before I decided to get a terminal degree, heh, so I could teach sf as “literature”), because of my personal experiences.

    How can I separate my “politics” from my “aesthetics”? I’m not sure anybody can, or should. And I don’t really trust anybody who claims that their “objective” assessment of anything (let alone art, literature, music, etc.) is based on some universal/neutral criteria that have nothing to do with a specific cultural context, which means, “politics” in the broader sense of ideology.

28. @airboy: If you think either “Obama and Clinton both proclaimed loudly and often that toppling middle east dictatorships was a bad thing” or many liberals aren’t outraged about Libya, may I suggest that it’s you whose views are laughable.

29. Airboy:

    “assess the nominees on the basis of how much they liked them. If Aeronaut had finished below no award I would not have this opinion.”

    To be honest, I wavered a bit about the Aeronaut’s Windlass, because I felt it was bad. Bad as in shoddy worldbuilding, cardboard characters, ridiculous amonunt of action without anyone getting tired and no action whatsoever taken by anyone apart from the main characters. And very irritating SJW Credentials that I wanted do drown somewhere.

    But in the end I gave it the last place, right above No Award.

    “Entertainment Weekly’s take last year was so laughable that the story was retracted.”

    No, it wasn’t. There was a small update to correct a minor error if that is what you mean.

    “But angry complaints that both leftist publications and rightest publications (see Breitbart) did not look at the winners and the nominees as pure political gamesmanship is ignoring reality.”

    The reality was that it had more to do with corrupt cronyism from the puppies than political gamemanship.

    “But where was the liberal outrage?”

    Well, both Clinton and Obama are rightwing from my perspective, as are liberals. I was out demonstrating against them both. Were you? And what the hell has this to do with the Hugos?

    Oh wait, I guess this is where you disappear. Go somewhere else, refuse to read any answers. And then you’ll be back in two weeks, starting on something else. Never participating in a dialogue.

30. If Aeronaut had finished below no award I would not have this opinion.

    So you think it is okay for other Hugo voters to have tastes different from yours so long as they are not too different from yours. I didn’t think The Aeronaut’s Windlass was the worst nominee this year, but given that its competition for that honor was Seveneves that’s kind of damning it with faint praise.

    BTW – few of you seem to have any understanding of conservatives, conservative or libertarian thought at all. As a group the 770s view of conservatives is laughable.

    Your cartoon version of conservatism is what it laughable. I’m willing to bet that many of the commenters here are more well-read in conservative thought than you are. Just my experience reading conservative and libertarian legal thinking during my years in law school makes me better grounded in conservative political thinking than most people who identify as conservatives.

    Let me give you an example. Obama and Clinton both proclaimed loudly and often that toppling middle east dictatorships was a bad thing. That bad things result when the US and the West topple middle east dictatorships. Then Obama & Clinton launch a war against Libya, without Congressional approval, and topple that dictatorship.

    Other than Senate Resolution 85 you mean.

    Many conservatives and all libertarians were against the Libya adventure. But where was the liberal outrage?

    Let’s see: Nader condemned the intervention, as did Kucinich. Both called for Obama’s impeachment over it. Jim Webb and Charles Rangel opposed it as well. There were numerous public demonstrations in places like New York, Chicago, Boston, and Washington D.C. – the tenor of these demonstrations indicated they were done by liberals, and not by conservatives.

    Conservative opposition was not particularly strong. Polls showed that 70+% of self-identified “Tea Partiers” supported the no-fly zone, with ~60% in favor of directly targeting Libyan troops. McCain and Rubio both came out in support of the effort as did John Negroponte.

31. I take it that when people say we ‘defeated’ the slaters, this does not mean that we made a deliberate assault on them and were successful, but just that by continuing to do our regular thing, we prevented them winning.

    But anyway, I don’t think the ‘defeat’ of the slaters happened primarily in Best Novel; the slate hadn’t has that much of an impact in that category in the first place. The win for ‘Cat Pictures Please’ was a defeat of the the slate, because it was a non-slate nominee winning over a lot of slated ones; and the win for ‘Folding Beijing’ was a defeat of the slate, because it showed they couldn’t put us off our stride by nominating something. But the win for The Fifth Season was a straightforward win by the book people liked best, over a selection of other legitimately nominated works.

    Hampus: Goodreads thinks Uprooted is YA, but I wasn’t aware anyone else did. I think they got there by an over-rigid application of the ‘protagonist’s age’ rule.

    Various: I think it’s totally fair to drop a book after reading just a bit of it; what is not fair is saying ‘After reading the first two pages, I dropped this book because it does not contain [whatever]’ – which seems to be what Paulk is doing in this case.

32. Lela E. Buis:

    “…but the Rabid Puppies only scored with “Folding Beijing.” “

    Eh, no? Rabid Puppies also won with “The Sandman: Overture”, “The Martian”, “Andy Weir” and “File 770”. That’s several wins and they should be patting themselves on the back.

33. This did confuse the political issue, and the Sad Puppies scored several wins, but the Rabid Puppies only scored with “Folding Beijing.” This suggests the voting was aimed at chastising Vox Day.

    A finalist from the Rabid Puppy slate won Best Graphic Story, Best Novelette, Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation, Best Professional Artist, Best Fanzine, and the Campbell Award.

    You really should engage in some fact-checking before you run your mouth. You would look less foolish if you did so.

34. I read Uprooted and loved it uncomplicatedly. I read The Fifth Season afterwards and was devastated by it, it stayed with me longer, and I ultimately decided it was better and put it first on my ballot and Uprooted second. Either outcome would have seemed fair to me on terms of merit.

    BTW, Lela, if memory serves, weren’t you the one who dropped by here a month or two ago to tell us (with undertones of awe) how VERY dangerous it was to have VD as an enemy?

    But now you’re asserting that VD, who has chosen to treat N. K. Jemisin as one of his most prominent enemies for years in vile fashion, has managed by doing so to rouse enough sympathy for her to win the Best Hugo novel.

    Is VD a dangerous alpha male enemy OR a bumbling malicious idiot whose attacks on his ‘enemies’ backfire so badly that they are not merely ineffective, they actually benefit his enemy?

    Pick one. You can’t have it both ways. Keeping such mutually contradictory concepts in your head at the same time is dangerous doublethink (tm some leftist writer) that is likely to end up scrambling the fine brain God gave you.

35. Common ground only goes so far.

36. @Lela: You argued that 2016 votes for Jemisin were anti-puppy rather than quality; now you’re trying to buttress that failure with an outsider’s description of what happened in 2015, when there were no such choices. You might get away with that in a high-school debate if the judges were asleep; among adults it’s just cheating.

    On a completely different note, NPR details on today’s item 3. IMO it was a good way to mock the wowzers \and/ make more people think about just what fools the banners are. Not that I’m especially fond of some of their blacklist — I have limited patience with the woes of the 1% in A Separate Peace — but the school district that banned it as a “filthy trashy sex novel” had its collective head up its ass.

37. Are we still talking about guilty reading? Mine now is the manga The Gamer. The art is kind of simplistic. The plot leaves much to wish for and the worldbuilding was forgotten somewhere in the beginning. And it is a harem manga.

    Still it pushes my RPG-triggers, this where you get your points to develop your character, start to think about skills and so on…

38. Andrew M said:

    Goodreads thinks Uprooted is YA, but I wasn’t aware anyone else did. I think they got there by an over-rigid application of the ‘protagonist’s age’ rule.

    As far as I know, Goodreads categorizes books based on its users’ tags. Most GR users don’t tag the books they shelve, though (other than with the permanent tags “read,” “to read,” and “currently reading”). Looking at Uprooted‘s GR entry right now, 50,000+ users have rated it and 9000+ have reviewed it, but only 1800+ have tagged it “fantasy,” and a miniscule 285 users have tagged it “young adult.”

    So Uprooted has gotten categorized as young adult on Goodreads based on how it was tagged by ~0.5% of the users who read the book.

39. Following on Petrea’s “computer recognition is hard” link, NPR tells of an automagically anonymized cow.

    And a weird line of connections: electronic toll tech was derived from Theremin’s work.

40. @airboy

    BTW – few of you seem to have any understanding of conservatives, conservative or libertarian thought at all. As a group the 770s view of conservatives is laughable.

    I must agree with you. However, there is a flaw in your reasoning. You see, I would note that this remains a somewhat American-dominated site, and that thus the view of many of us is coloured by the currently laughable state of American conservatism.

    American libertarianism, as far as I can tell, is indistinguishable on a party/ candidate support basis from American conservatism.

    Regarding your claims on the the lack of protests regarding the Libyan intervention – here. Take a look at who comes up regularly as participating in those protests. Guess who doesn’t.

    I know this American culture war b/s is bread and butter for you, but do you realise how ridiculous you come of when you say nonsensical stuff like this?

41. So Uprooted has gotten categorized as young adult on Goodreads based on how it was tagged by ~0.5% of the users who read the book.

    For what it is worth: Out of 1,390 users on LibraryThing who have Uprooted listed in their libraries, 30 have tagged it “young adult”, and another 19 have tagged it “YA”. The book has 133 reviews.

42. In the Cat Pictures department, the daily email from Woot has a T-shirt design with a cat sitting in a piece of luggage.

    Last night I caught a rerun of an old Dick Cavett show with Catherine Mackin, Rod Serling and Arthur C. Clarke from 1972. Serling was promoting The Man and talking about Night Gallery. Clarke got to debunk an urban legend. I’m beginning to despair over what has become of the late night talk shows.

    Whatever happened to Fay Wray*?

    * Sorry. It’s become a Pavlovian response.

43. Hmmm, well not a cat person, but for all you EssJayDubyas out there…

    Valiant Comics is having cat cosplay covers for some of their December issues. As per their quote:

    “This might be the single best thing anyone anywhere has done, ever,”

    Hrrm

    (fyi, Marvel had a human cosplay cover theme last year)

44. If Uprooted is YA, then all I can say is that the sex scenes in YA have gotten more..uh…more since I was a young fellow reading authors like Rosemary Sutcliff and John Christopher.

45. @ JJ: Sometimes the bigotry/stereotyping shows thru in unexpected ways. I used to know a white woman who complained that her parents had given her a “black name”. The name in question was Denise — the feminine form of “Dennis”*, and a common and unexceptionable name in the Very White Suburb where I grew up. But for her, raised in the Deep South, any name that started with “De-” was a “black” name.

    * Well, actually of the French male name “Denis”. But still.

    @ NickPheas: Whining about government is generally, though not always, the sign of someone who doesn’t want anybody else telling them what they can’t do. There are a lot of elected American politicians who have not matured emotionally past the age of five.

    Ghost Bird: I’m not seeing anything at that link which doesn’t sound like an approximation of European socialism — which is still a form of government. The “drown it in the bathtub” types want to eradicate government altogether and replace it with… *crickets*.

    (Actually, you can track what they do want from the shape of the statements they make. They’re not really anti-government at all; they just want one that will rubber-stamp everything THEY want, and viciously suppress anyone who wants something they don’t want. Hence the feminist comeback that conservatives want “a government small enough to fit into my uterus”.)

    There’s also the issue that “village politics” don’t scale up well once you get to a size where the people in such a cooperative venture don’t all know each other. Hell, they don’t even always work when all the people involved do know each other — ask anyone who’s lived in a commune or a cohousing development.

    I couldn’t get thru Sorcery and Cecelia at all. You’d think it would be right up my alley, but it went into the cull box unfinished; something about the main character just got up my nose.

46. (3) (banned book hunt) far from sounding over-the-top, sounds to me like a themed version of BookCrossing.

    re: governments and bathtubs: During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was an image circulating the internet which juxtaposed Norquist’s infamous quote with an aerial view of the drowned city. It was a bitter and cogent critique of the mindset that holds “smaller government” as an ideal for no better reason than “government is bad and we want less of it”.

    On the lighter side, another popular satire of that quote, or at least that ideal, which critiques conservatives who fought so long to keep same-sex marriage and even same-sex sex illegal was “A government small enough to fit in the bedroom.”

47. really late :;tickbox::

48. Nickp:

    “If Uprooted is YA, then all I can say is that the sex scenes in YA have gotten more..uh…more since I was a young fellow reading authors like Rosemary Sutcliff and John Christopher.”

    I would say that there could be a lot more sex in swedish YA books when I grew up. Very, very much more. And in detail.

49. @Lela E. Buis: (lots of really silly stuff) – Why do you ask so many disingenuous questions? Will we ever see non-trolling posts by you? Why haven’t I plonked you long since?

    @Bravo Lima Poppa: Yes, the latest round of trolling has lead me to this. Thanks for saving me the time of inspecting. 😉

50. @robinareid:

    Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

    I’ve added Grass to the never-ending TBR based on your thumbnail description.

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