Pixel Scroll 9/3 The Nine Billion Noms of Dog

(1) Digg has the best space images from the month of August. They are beauties.

As we tediously while away our days down here on Earth, satellites are zooming through space, snapping incredible pictures of Earth, the solar system and outer space. Here are the highlights from August.

(2) Answer just 4 questions, and the William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Sonnet Generator will create a unique 14-line love sonnet just for you!

What Is Lovely As A Summer Slate

Based on the William Shakespeare Star Wars series by Ian Doescher

When sorely press’d by Sith-like enemy,
I think on thee, and soon have no regret.
My heart is lock’d, yet thou dost hold the key,
Our lives are join’d in lovers’ sweet duet.
Let us unto Naboo, its shores of green,
There meet the call of passion at our best.
If thou wert droid, I’d love thee, though machine
If thou would claim mine heart, I’ll not protest.
Love, like a lightsaber, one’s heart can slay,
Love is the new-grown fruit sprung from the heart,
Love plunges one headlong into the fray,
Love is the canvas, passion is the art.
Let rivals come, who chase me at the rear,
Thou hast e’er been my solace, dear.

(3) Radio Times learned nothing from Christopher Eccleston about Doctor Who in a recent interview.

When asked if he’d been watching his successor Peter Capaldi onscreen recently, Christopher Eccleston replied in the negative – in a pretty big way.

“I never watched Doctor Who when I was a child,” he retorted. “I never watched MYSELF as Doctor Who!”

(4) Pat Cadigan on Facebook

After recent events in which Bryan Thomas Schmidt did a solid for both me and everyone else working on MACII, I’ve had some thoughts:

Whatever else happens on social media, on websites, in review columns, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I want a kinder, gentler worldcon.

Worldon is our annual gathering of the clans, not a field of combat. We go there to enjoy ourselves and to be among friends. For a few days, we get to hang out on Planet Science Fiction/Fantasy.

Worldcon is *not* a battlefield.

This is not to say that those with opposing perspectives can’t have a meaningful, even spirited dialog. But there’s a big difference between a heated discussion between people who feel strongly about their respective positions and gladiatorial combat in the Colisseum for the lurid amusement of people who didn’t even bother to show up and in fact never intended to.

I don’t care what your point of view is; I don’t even care if you don’t like *me*––you’re welcome at MACII and I will do nothing to make you feel like you aren’t. But worldcon isn’t a passive, static thing like a department store. Worldcon is interactive (worldcon was interactive before it was fashionable)––what you get out of if, for the most part, is what you put into it. If you go to the panels, check out the dealers’ room and the art show, meet some writers or artists or other pros at kaffeeklatsches, literary beers, or signings, go to the bid parties, and make a little effort to meet new people, you’ll have a great time…

(5) Can you tell this book by the cover?

(6) Tom Knighton gives his “Thoughts on Sad Puppies 4”.

For most people, the idea of tens of thousands voting for the Hugos should make you giddy.  For us, it has added benefits of rendering any small group influence on the awards non-existent.  No, our favorites may not win, but you know what?  That’s life.  What we want to see win is the stuff the actual fan–the people that [George R.R.] Martin may dismiss but who buy books by the truckload–actually reads.

While Martin doesn’t think it will add to the prestige of the award, more fans voting on them will do one thing from my perspective.  We’ll start to see some books win that actually look interesting and then deliver on the inside.  With the exception of Three Body Problem (which I haven’t read yet, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt), that hasn’t been the default position of the Hugos in some time.

(7) Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Kittens – “My first (seven) reactions to the surprise announcement of Sad Puppies 4”

4 reasons to pet the Puppies:

  1. Tone

The Puppy organizers Kate Paulk, Sarah A. Hoyt and Amanda S. Green have written things that I consider stupid, hateful and obnoxious, but the Sad Puppies 4 announcement was phrased very un-obnoxiously. Civility is a nice thing.

  1. It’s not a slate, really

Listing more works than one can nominate for the Hugos and stating up front that one should read the stuff before suggesting it are good and play down the slate aspect.

  1. No more shady correct taste comissars

With Sad Puppies 3, Brad Torgersen had a somewhat similar nominee suggestion phase (that had humorously few participants). After that, though, he ditched most of the stuff people had suggested and went on with the things that were written by his chums. There will be no more of that, it seems.

  1. Focus on MOAR

The Puppy trio has promised to focus on participation instead of ideological screeds. It remains to be seen if that is a promise they are able to keep.

(8) Barry Deutsch – “Don’t Be Fooled – Kate Paulk’s Kinder, Gentler Sad Puppy Slate Is Still A Slate”

For instance, in 2012 (before the puppies), 611 Hugo voters turned in ballots for short stories. The most popular short story, E. Lily Yu’s amazing The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees, was listed on only 72 of those 611 ballots (about 12%). At least 60% of those 611 ballots didn’t vote for any of the top five nominated stories.

And that’s fine. That’s how the Hugo nominations are designed to work. 611 Hugo voters, acting as individuals, each nominate whatever short stories they think are award-worthy. From that list of hundreds of short stories, the five most-nominated make it to the final ballot.

Unfortunately, it’s an easy system to game, as the Puppies have proven. If you can form a voting bloc of just 100 people who will nominate an agreed-upon list, instead of voting as individuals, that’s enough to completely overwhelm the much larger number of Hugo voters who are voting as individuals. 100 people voting for just 5 works will beat out 500 people voting from among hundreds of works.

(9) Philip Sandifer – “Weird Kitties: An Organized Anti-Slate For The 2016 Hugos”

The good news is that there are five thousand of us, united, if nothing else, by the facts that 1) We voted in the Hugos, and 2) We are not Puppies of any stripe. We are not a campaign. We are not a political movement. We are not playing some elaborate game of four-dimensional chess in order to topple Christendom. Indeed we, in the sense of “me and everyone reading this,” are not even all five thousand voters. But nevertheless, we are a bunch of fans defined by the simple fact that we’re eligible to nominate things for Hugos next year, and we’re not Vox Day’s pack of rabid dogs.

One of the most helpful things, then, would be if all five thousand of us nominated, and if we nominated a full ballot. Among us, we’ve got 25,000 open slots on our ballots in every category with which to push a work over the slate-busting threshold of 541. That’s doable, but it’s also hard. A lot of us, myself included, don’t identify five eligible Hugo-worthy items in every category in a normal year’s reading. In many categories, a lot of us don’t identify one. We don’t all have writing Winds of Winter to be distracted from, after all. And we could use some help.

So I’m creating Weird Kitties for exactly that. It’s going to be an ongoing conversation about awesome science fiction and fantasy that’s come out and is coming out in 2015, conducted for people who want to fill in their Hugo ballots with things they love.

(10) Camestros Felapton – “How big should the Hugo Awards”

What is the ideal number of people to vote on the Hugo Awards? I’d say it should be around whatever the number of people is that feel they can make a reasonable decision on the least popular story category (Novelette? I haven’t checked historically) – i.e. how many people are taking an active interest in SF/F Novelettes published in English in a given year. I don’t know what that number is but those are the interesting people. Why? Because they are people looking at newer writers and people doing interesting things and who are interested in trends etc.

(11) John C. Wright – “Hugo Controversy Quiz Questions”

Theodore Beale, who writes under the pen name Vox Day, joined us as an ally, but disagreed with the goals. He thought the award could not be salvaged and restored to its former glory; indeed, the only thing that could be done would be to force the politically-correctness faction (which he calls by the mocking title Social Justice Warriors, at one time their own name for themselves) to reveal their true purposes. His plan was to make it clear to any honest onlooker that the awards were being given out not based on merit, but due to politics. For this reason, he promoted his own slate of suggested works for his fans to read and vote upon, called the Rabid Puppies.

The Social Justice Warriors did in fact react precisely as Mr Beale predicted, and after the Sad Puppies unexpectedly swept several categories in the nominations, the SJWs used their superior numbers to vote NO AWARD into that category rather than give the award to whichever work was most worthy among the candidates.

This was done purely and openly for political reasons. The mask is torn. No honest onlooker can doubt the motive of the Social Justice Warriors at this point, or ponder whether the claims made by the Sad Puppies were true or false.

(12) Sarah Mirk of Bitch Media interviews Ann Vandermeer in “’Sisters of the Revolution’ Collects Powerful Feminist Sci-Fi”

I was wondering what you think of the “puppies” pushback to the Awards and what that reveal.

Well I have to say I was really excited at the people that won. The best novel category, I was very, very excited about that, because I know both the writer and the translator, so that was—I mean the way that I look at the outcome of the entire awards ceremony is it was showing you that science fiction is bigger than just the United States and the U.K. That’s how I felt. The science fiction community is definitely making that outreach into the wider world. When you think about the Hugos, what you’re looking at is a popularity contest in a sense because the awards are going to be voted on by the people that buy the memberships. It’s plain and simple. It’s not a juried award, there’s no judge, it’s just who’s voting and how they’re voting. So it’s just by the numbers. When you look at it that way, the thing that was really exciting to me is that this past year they had more than double the average number of people voting than they’ve had in the past. I think they had close to 6,000 people who voted.

Did more people turn out to vote because they’d heard about the controversy over the awards?

Well, I think people were getting more involved in the discussion. If you take a look at the numbers, and you look at the number of people who are actually members of World Con, every single person who signs up for a membership, whether it’s supporting or attending, can vote. So, typically, only half of the people that have memberships, vote. Only half. It’s kind of like when you take a look at our Presidential elections, what’s the percentage of people that vote? Not everybody. But we had so many people that actually voted. Now, here’s the good thing about that. It’s not true for every voter, I’m not naïve, but a lot of voters went in and read the stories, which to me is amazing. So a lot of those stories got a larger audience than they ever would.

(13) Didact’s Reach – “So what now, Hugo?”

The detailed statistics behind the awards results showed very clearly that the voters at WorldCon and Sasquan were perfectly willing to undermine the legitimacy of their own award process in order to keep out those that they don’t like. LTC Tom Kratman, John C. Wright, Steve Rsaza, a number of Baen authors, and Toni Weisskopf herself, were all denied awards that they richly deserved and should have won for their respective categories.

Yet, instead of even bothering to consider the alternatives, five different categories were given “No Award”. The Hugo and Nebula Awards were, essentially, reduced to a farce. And all because politics overruled etiquette, courtesy, wisdom, and good judgement.

The SJWs who currently control the nomination and award process have made it perfectly clear that they intend to amend the (already incomprehensible) rules for next year’s ballot in order to prevent a similar uprising from happening again. Good luck with that; I have every reason to think that the Sad Puppies leaders for next year, Amanda Green, Kate Paulk, and Sarah A. Hoyt, will simply adapt, react, and overcome in order to get works by actual skilled authors that fans actually might want to read up for nominations.

(14) Jed Hartman on Lorem Ipsum – “Why I love the Hugos”

I acknowledge that the system is contentious and complicated and initially confusing, and I’m sad that people feel excluded, because I want everyone who’s interested to feel like they can be part of it. In general, I feel like bringing more people into the process means that the awards are more valid, because they’re less likely to represent the views of only a few people.

And there’s a whole lot of room for expansion. Even though I agree that the financial barrier to entry is high, that’s certainly not the only issue, because every year a large percentage of the Worldcon members who are eligible to vote don’t do so. So it’s great that the nominating and voting numbers have been going up and up in recent years, but there are still a lot of people who could vote but don’t, and a lot of other people who want to but can’t.

But even so. Despite all of the system’s flaws; despite my eye-rolling when an MC yet again does the “I’m going to make this ceremony last as long as possible” schtick; despite occasional bad behavior on the part of an MC or a presenter or a nominee; despite my personal disappointment that the magazine I edited for twelve years hasn’t yet won one (I’ve wanted a Hugo since I was a kid); despite the sometimes-contentious arguing about what should be nominated and what should win; despite my dubiousness about making nominees sit there tensely waiting to find out whether they’ve won, and about the basic idea of declaring one particular work or person to be the “best” of the year; despite everything—the Hugos are important to me.

And I especially love the Hugo ceremony itself, in all its disparate parts. The pause to honor the people in our field who’ve died over the past year, as their names scroll by on the screen. The awards honoring contributions to fandom, like the Big Heart award. The occasional very entertaining MCs. The beautiful designs for the Hugo award base. The passing-along of the Campbell tiara. The delight of most of the winners. The sometimes gracious and sometimes funny and sometimes overwhelmed acceptance speeches. The rush to analyze the stats afterward. The whole thing, flaws and all. It’s one of my favorite things about Worldcon, which is (despite its flaws) one of my favorite conventions.

(15) Robert Bevan on Caverns and Creatures “Hugo Loss (Sad Puppies Can Eat a Dick.)”

  1. What do the Sad Puppies see as the problem? 

SJW, the all-too-often abbreviated form of the “Social Justice Warrior”. It’s most often used as a lazy means for bigots to dismiss opinions which differ from whatever they were told by their daddy/preacher/grand wizard.

Having said that, I will admit to being annoyed by people I perceive as SJWs (in the derogatory sense) as well. In fact, they were an entry in my Reviewers Who Can Eat a Dick post right up until the final edit. I ended up removing that entry because I felt it made me sound like a whiny asshole, and because it’s so hard to differentiate an actual advocate for social justice, which is something that I admire, from an obnoxious loudmouth who’s only interested in scoring sensitivity points by pretending to be offended by innocuous words. (If enough people read this, I’ll get a few comments calling me a misogynist, in spite of the SJW nature of this post, for using the phrase “Cry like little bitches.” in the above entry.)

The puppies’ stated problem was that these SJWs had already compromised the integrity of the Hugos by voting along the lines of authors’ race, gender, sexuality, or politics, rather than based on the quality of the actual books they were voting on. Books with “messages” and meaning were winning out over good old-fashioned fun space romps, like the kind Puppies like to write.

That last sentence is paraphrased from what I read on one of the puppies’ blogs. The implication seemed to be that their books were more deserving of a prestigious award specifically because they were devoid of anything important to say. By that metric, my books should be pulling in Hugos left and right.

(16) Vox Day declares:

John Scalzi can ban all the parodies he likes. The VFM [Vile Faceless Minions] will just publish more bestsellers. Strike one down and two pop right back up to the top of the category within 24 hours.

parodies_3

(17) Scalzi looked over the goods and said…

(18) Kevin Standlee is working on a proposal to drop some Hugo categories and add others.

I think we’ve reached a point, in small steps, where a significant proportion of the Hugo Award electorate doesn’t know how to actually nominate in at least three categories, and at worst derides those categories because they think they are so complicated or need specialist knowledge that they’ll never have. This is not good for the health of the Hugo Awards. I therefore propose that we should delete three existing categories that people find confusing and unclear and replace them with three new categories that, while not perfectly defined (it’s difficult to define things completely air-tight), are at least more accessible and understandable to the people picking up the ballot or reading the results list.

Categories to Delete

  • Best Semiprozine
  • Best Editor Long Form
  • Best Editor Short Form

Categories to Add

  • Best Professional Magazine
  • Best Anthology or Collection
  • Best Publisher

(19) Andrew Porter writes:

Couldn’t get to Smokane? The smoke made it to the East Coast … by the middle of last week, according to this report. That explains the haze and pollution so many places on the East Coast have been experiencing.

[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Steven H Silver, Mark, Barry Deutsch and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day John Seavey.]

580 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/3 The Nine Billion Noms of Dog

  1. JJ on September 5, 2015 at 12:03 am said:

    Mark: But seriously, who writes a story at 7507 words?!?

    Someone who wants their story to fall into the less-cluttered classification of Novelette, come award nomination time.

    But anything in the 20% gray zone at a category boundary can end up in either category, usually depending on where the voters placed it, but ultimately based on the Adminstrator’s judgement. See also Section 3.8 of the WSFS Constitution for the rules about how Administrators can move nominations between categories.

  2. @JJ:

    “Does your library have a “Suggest a Purchase” function? Because I use that to request any book they haven’t already ordered, and when they do order it, I automatically get put on the Hold list (and usually I’m first, because the Acquisitions people for my library system pretty much order everything I ask for, and usually several copies).

    Maybe your library does this, too. You might give it a try.”

    I just moved back to the area after several years away, and the library’s online system is completely different from when I left. I’m still finding delightful surprises. The library where I was for the past three years didn’t have a request acquisitions option, so it didn’t even dawn on me to look for it here. But *of course*, there it is, right in front of me.

    (The new system has a feature I’d been wanting for ages and ages – the ability to temporarily pause my rank in the waitlist if it looks like I’m going to be away when the book arrives. Which, inevitably, happened every time I left town and I’d have to start all over again – sometimes for books I’d already been waiting 8 months for. I am so happy to be back to a large library that eventually has everything I’m looking for, and I’m extra excited that the new online system is so powerful compared to the old one.)

  3. But what else are you going to call people who aren’t Puppies? Because, literally, the one single thing those people all have in common is that they are SFF fans who aren’t Puppies.

    The rest of Hugo voters?

  4. Can I cede my cat to someone else? Not that I don’t like them, but my sinuses protest. And my landlord, but given the evidence, I doubt he cares that much.

    In re: gin-as-working-class: yeah, that seems a very Victorian England interpretation. It’s got that history, for sure, but…my mom’s family, who’s working-class, drinks beer/whiskey/wine coolers/often nothing at all, because they’re more cautious about drinking. My exposure to gin came from Dad’s side, where gin and tonics are the summer third of the Preppy Wheel of the Year.*

    * One drinks G&Ts in summer, martinis in spring, Manhattans in fall. It’s the beautiful cycle of life and nobody’s really sure what to do about winter; camps are divided into “wine, maybe spiced,” “spiked eggnog,” and “just extend Manhattan season, honestly,” There was that one winter where Dad got boxed Cosmos, but I don’t know that this should get back to my more traditional relatives.

  5. The puppy obsession with the dinosaur story is still bizarre to me, especially their admant insistence and total unity on giving it a reading that is such a distortion of the text actually present in the story.

    The only thing in the rest of life that even comes close is religious groups, where Catholics and Protestants can start wars over what things like what “begotten from above” or “this is my blood” are supposed to mean.

  6. I think non-Puppies or non-Puppy fans would do. Used cautiously, anti-Puppy for someone who has spoken out against the Puppies or slates is not unreasonable.

    Nope. Nope nope nope. I am not and never will be “anti-Puppy”. I’m anti-slate and not a Puppy, but I don’t have anything in particular against any individual Puppy.

    Some of their leaders have managed to offend me enough that they are persona non grata as far as I’m concerned, but I’m not anti-Puppy. As long as they are fans, read/watch what they like and nominate only the stuff they’ve read that they think is the best, I’ve got no problem with them.

    That said, if they associate themselves with VD or other Puppy leaders and follow the very poor leads of those guys, then I will certainly look at them askance and be less willing to interact with them. VD is toxic, and most of the other leaders in the group have shown themselves to be happily led by VD’s actions and beliefs. That still doesn’t make me anti-Puppy, but I don’t have to hate something to find it prudent to avoid it.

    (writing from 0442)

  7. I am not and never will be “anti-Puppy”. I’m anti-slate and not a Puppy, but I don’t have anything in particular against any individual Puppy.

    Fair enough. It is an artifact of SP3 declaring themselves US and anyone who disagrees THEM. So far SP4 has mostly sidestepped that issue by concentrating on their own actions rather than talking about others. Let’s hope this lasts.

  8. Also, the misapplied alpha/beta/etc thing is one of the reasons I myself Cannot Even, as the kids say, with the majority of werewolf-based urban fantasy/romance out there. Because it’s one not-my-cup-of-tea thing to read about a relationship where dude (and it is always fucking dude) is super dominant but he can’t help being a bossy prick because of instincts, and quiiiiite another to read about it being excused Because Alpha.

    (If you really want animals with male-female dominance hierarchies and whatnot, your best bet is chimpanzees. Nobody writes about were-chimps, however, insofar as In The Arms of the Shitflinging Faceater doesn’t reach a large demographic, for some reason.)

    /rant

  9. Those of you who are annoyed about how that “alpha wolf” trope keeps getting injected into stories of lycanthropes, might be interested in the webcomic How to Be a Werewolf, whose writer/artist has explicitly sworn they’re never going to use said trope.

  10. But what else are you going to call people who aren’t Puppies?

    Not Puppies.

    I’m surprised I have to explain this to you.

    Signed,

    Richard Brandt
    “Not A Puppy”

  11. Isabel C. on September 5, 2015 at 10:32 am said:
    Also, the misapplied alpha/beta/etc thing is one of the reasons I myself Cannot Even, as the kids say, with the majority of werewolf-based urban fantasy/romance out there. Because it’s one not-my-cup-of-tea thing to read about a relationship where dude (and it is always fucking dude) is super dominant but he can’t help being a bossy prick because of instincts, and quiiiiite another to read about it being excused Because Alpha.

    (If you really want animals with male-female dominance hierarchies and whatnot, your best bet is chimpanzees. Nobody writes about were-chimps, however, insofar as In The Arms of the Shitflinging Faceater doesn’t reach a large demographic, for some reason.)

    /rant

    I’m told the whole Alpha/Beta/etc. discourse originally came from research done on hierarchies in female chickens.
    It makes me unable to read the SexySexy Super Dominant Alpha Male stuff without picturing them as Mean Girl hens.

  12. @Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag:

    Nope. Nope nope nope. I am not and never will be “anti-Puppy”. I’m anti-slate and not a Puppy, but I don’t have anything in particular against any individual Puppy.

    Personally, I have rethought the notion of being anti-slate. That just doesn’t work for me. Slate is perfectly nice. I’m a slate fan, and might even some day write slate fanfic.

    Wollastonite, now, that’s just gross. All of that metamorphic milky-whiteness just doesn’t do it for me.

    So, mark me down as a spokescritter for the anti-wollastonite faction.

    ETA: ‘Bad minerals and the geologists who love them. Next, on Geraldo.’

  13. Well, “SJW” is right out. It’s been months, and I still haven’t received my Siamese cat!

    There’s been an administrative backup at the factory with the notary-seal-stamping process.

  14. @Lauowolf: I kind of love that, all the more so because there’s some kind of horrible crossover between that and the “Pick a Little, Talk a Little” Music Man number going on in my brain now.

  15. @Cubist on September 5, 2015 at 11:42 am said:

    Those of you who are annoyed about how that “alpha wolf” trope keeps getting injected into stories of lycanthropes, might be interested in the webcomic How to Be a Werewolf, whose writer/artist has explicitly sworn they’re never going to use said trope.

    Thanks for the recommendation!

  16. Cubist on September 5, 2015 at 11:42 am said:
    […] you […] might be interested in the webcomic How to Be a Werewolf

    Read form the start, added to my list of webcomics to follow – many thanks!

  17. Isabel C. on September 5, 2015 at 12:17 pm said:
    @Lauowolf: I kind of love that, all the more so because there’s some kind of horrible crossover between that and the “Pick a Little, Talk a Little” Music Man number going on in my brain now.

    This is what my brain comes up with:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKss2pBYQ6Y
    Again, though, Manly Men fail.

  18. It’s how wild puppies are fed by their parents. The parents bring back meat and regurgitate it when the puppies beg.

    Substitue “opinions” for “meat” and you’ve got rurther confirmation that the Puppies choice of moniker was not inappropriate

  19. Personally, I’m still trying to work out what Mr. Beale has against members of the Stanford Jazz Workshop, who among other things have struck me as no less reflexively truthful than your average musicians.

  20. @Kurt Busiek,
    Wait, I haven’t received my Siamese cat either, but if the process requires cruelty to Notary Seals (a detail mysteriously omitted in the SJW application form) then I cannot in good conscience be party to such activities. Please cancel my SJW membership forthwith.

    Yr Hmbl Crrspndt

  21. Handy when people use sexist term like “authoress.”. Tips me right off it is someone to ignorw.

  22. Rev. Bob said:

    While the first Doctor Who story I ever saw was a PBS airing of a Tom Baker story (The Sontaran Experiment, which totally underwhelmed me), I count McCoy as my first Doctor. One of the first friends I made at college was a total Whovian and gave me a proper introduction to the series, and I liked the “dark and mysterious” vibe McCoy brought to the role. Ace was a great complement to that.

    I was lucky. The first PBS-aired Doctor Who story I randomly stumbled into on a Saturday afternoon was “The Pirate Planet”, one of the Key To Time stories and one of the two completed episodes written by Douglas Adams. The other Adams, ” City of Death” is my all time favourite old Who episode and aired a couple weeks later. I was hooked.

  23. Wait, I haven’t received my Siamese cat either, but if the process requires cruelty to Notary Seals (a detail mysteriously omitted in the SJW application form) then I cannot in good conscience be party to such activities. Please cancel my SJW membership forthwith.

    Oh, the seals are fine. They like stamping on things.

    The cats don’t like it, though. And there’s been some territoriality over the fish.

    Nevertheless, if you no longer wish to be a SJW, then all we’ll need is a verification slip signed by John C. Wright and Kate Paulk. Send that along before the seals corner your cat, and everything will be fine.

  24. If I could write urban fantasy, I’d use the actual basis for the alpha/beta wolf stuff – a group of unrelated individuals put together in a highly stressful and artificial situation. So the established werewolf packs would be like normal wolves; the alpha stuff would happen with dysfunctional rogue werewolves forced together with no support system.

    As I can’t write urban fantasy, I just keep tossing that out hoping it finds a good home.

  25. @Cmm:

    I think only the true degenerates get toasters. 😉

    [Please tell me we’re riffing on the same reference…]

  26. @Richard Brandt:

    Apropos of nothing, I have to say that as far as paranormal romance titles go, Ready To Were struck me as pretty good.

    Say, the SP4 people want to make sure that the very most popular genre fiction has a good chance to be nominated for the 2016 Hugo Awards, to make the Awards more representative of fandom as a whole, and to attempt to ensure that at least ten thousand nominations get submitted to MAC2 — and it occurs to me that absolutely the most popular and underrepresented-in-Hugos genre fiction is paranormal romance. The volume of paranormal romance published each year is immense. Baen, Tor, DAW, Orbit, all of them are small change in comparison.

    I think those readers might just be the right crowd to help Kate, Sarah, Amanda, and friends reach their audacious goal. Think of it as the Berlin Airlift for the new century, shipping in a few thousand RT Book Reviews readers to help out.

    (In all seriousness, I do think WSFS ought to do a much better job making clear to genre romance fans that they’re appreciated and needn’t go only to Romanticon.)

  27. Now, calm down; you will all get your Siamese cats. There have been a few minor glitches that have nothing to do with the scratches on my arms or the half-empty container of chocolate-color hair dye.

  28. Oh no! Fraud in the Siamese cat distribution system!

    It’s 3696 A.D., our lizard overlords are benevolent, and I have no idea why I’m awake.

  29. You mean all this time, the Sad Puppies have really been about ethics in Siamese cat distribution?

    Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s 3995 and I have to go join the Jedi to kill some terentateks.

  30. While I can’t speak to whether she gets wolf pack dynamics absolutely zoologically right (I don’t know enough to say for sure), I do appreciate the way Carrie Vaughn subverts and repudiates the Alpha Wolf trope in many ways throughout her series beginning with Kitty and the Midnight Hour (and ending, just this year, for now anyway, with Kitty Saves the World).

    In other thoughts, who even uses “authoress” these days? Do they also still refer to female college students as “co-eds”? And female bakers as “baxters”, if we want to get really archaic?

    Don’t mind me. It all looks ancient from where I’m standing, that being September 6 of the year of our Dog 7761.

  31. Leslie C: Now, calm down; you will all get your Siamese cats. There have been a few minor glitches that have nothing to do with the scratches on my arms or the half-empty container of chocolate-color hair dye.

    It’s been very sad, being only Half An SJW for the last 5 weeks or so, but I am pleased to report that yesterday I received my new, notaried-by-seals replacement rescue Siamese.

    I seem to have gotten one of the early prototypes, as the color points are the entire body of the cat. However, as there appears to be only a minimum of hissing and growling, and it seems that amicable integration with the existing SJW credential is likely, I do not wish to register a complaint that you have, in fact, actually sent me a Basement Cat.

  32. @Nicole:

    Yes, I absolutely still see “coeds” used in some contexts. Even in these enlightened days of 3439, when your body and gender are whatever you want them to be. (Nano therapy has done amazing things in the last few centuries.)

  33. Now, calm down; you will all get your Siamese cats. There have been a few minor glitches that have nothing to do with the scratches on my arms or the half-empty container of chocolate-color hair dye.

    But what if we wanted a lilac-point one?

  34. But what if we wanted a lilac-point one?

    We never had this much trouble with the people who ordered the puppies. They were fine with all one color.

  35. @Nicole: DUDE I KNOW RIGHT.

    It was even worse back when I MUSHed (I am old) and people would try to spring things like “warrioress” and “bardess” and I’d be like I am only fifteen and the Nopetopus hasn’t been invented yet but FUCKING NOPE REGARDLESS,”

    …I have many feelings about this.

  36. My Siamese cats are full-body-pointed as well. (Well, one has little white toesies.)

    Experiments with flour to achieve more standard coloration were…. unsuccessful. <scubbing floor, walls, ceiling…> Sebastian and Dante inform me that full-body-pointing is a feature, not a bug. And then retire to the basement….

    (In 7706, we all have basements. In fact, that’s where we all must live, as the surface is a hellhole patrolled by marauding gangs who call themselves “puppiez”…)

  37. It was even worse back when I MUSHed (I am old) and people would try to spring things like “warrioress” and “bardess” and I’d be like I am only fifteen and the Nopetopus hasn’t been invented yet but FUCKING NOPE REGARDLESS,”

    In my ancient days of MUDding I played a paladin–well, a rogue impersonating a paladin, which the mechanics of that game allowed surprisingly well–and I was “Sir” and only “Sir” and none of this Lady crap. (I would allow ma’am, but anyone starting in with the m’lady-ing got a lecture, occasionally followed by a whupping.)

  38. Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little said:

    In other thoughts, who even uses “authoress” these days? Do they also still refer to female college students as “co-eds”? And female bakers as “baxters”, if we want to get really archaic?

    Indeed. That said, I find the term “aviatrix” kind of cool. But I won’t use it, promise!

  39. @RedWombat: Yay! And me too, only it was “ex-Dragonarmy mercenary chick, now sergeant-at-arms for personal house guard”. But definitely Don’t Call Me Lady, Dammit. I am not a lady, and I’m not yours, and shut up, and go away, and stop trying to make me any kind of good person because shut up.

    Like Mal from Firefly, only a frillion years earlier and *way* less personable.

    …god dammit now I want to play D&D.

  40. I miss my first paladin now. She had a very … strict interpretation of Lawful Good and refused to kill anything. She would tie up monsters and lecture them instead. She had pamphlets.

    I don’t recall anyone ever trying to call her Lady, but when another character attempted to snuggle up next to her while she was asleep, he ended up flung into a wall. Hard.

  41. Two kittens waltzed up to us a few weeks back as we walked our dogs: one a lynx point Siamese, the other (who appeared the next morning actually) not Siamese color but clearly the first one’s littermate (vets reported they were completely bonded, cried when separated, and had to be put together, and yeah, under eight weeks old). We figure that like the last kitten we found they were dumped, and since we cannot take on any more, we got them to a breed rescue group in the area. So clearly somebody’s SJW Siamese went astray…..

    Oh, a p.s. to my authoress comment. If the person using it also allows for priestesses and goddesses, I might give ’em a pass, but amazingly enough priestess has never appeared in any contemporary context I know of (would love to be linked to contradicting evidence), and I’m betting people who use different terms for women doing anything (including “lady+anything) probably would not be able to utter a word about goddesses.

  42. I don’t even use actress or waitress. Actor and waiter make perfectly good gender-neutral terms, just like doctor or baker.

  43. Helen S: I don’t even use actress or waitress. Actor and waiter make perfectly good gender-neutral terms, just like doctor or baker.

    Me too! But if people are using the marked terms for women in fields, then they need to be consistent, I say (/SNARK). The humor comes from the fact that most would never be consistent.

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