Pixel Scroll 9/4/17 Little Miss Muffet Sat On A Pixel. Along  Came A Scroll.

(1) YOUR 1962 HUGO WINNERS. The Traveler at Galactic Journey spent Labor Day Weekend in Chicago engaged in fandom’s favorite pastime of complaining about the Hugo winners, like that gosh-darned Heinlein novel, Stranger in a Strange Land: “[Sep. 4, 1962] Differences of opinion (the 1962 Hugo Awards!)”

This line-up shouldn’t shock me, given the pre-convention buzz, and yet it does.  Stranger has gotten a lot of attention, particularly from the mainstream edges of our fandom (probably because it dares to mention sex).  It has also earned its fair share of scorn.  It’s a lousy, preachy book, but if we’re judging by the sales, then it’s won its trophy, fair and square.

He hates Brian Aldiss’ winning works too! (Quick, the fainting cloths!)

I did give a Star to the first story in the Hothouse series, but the quality of the tales went down over the course of the publication.  I understand they were novelized early this year, so Aldiss may get another bite at the apple.  He doesn’t deserve it, though (the reviewer for UK sf digest, New Worlds, agrees with me).

(2) HANDMAID REX. Mari Mancusi saw something strange:

The handmaids were at the DragonCon parade. I’m a little concerned by the look of one of them…

(3) MORE SURPRISES. Here’s Atlanta Loop’s photos of the rest of the parade. Wait a minute – Jane Yolen was there?!?

Literary Guest of Honor and author of “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” Jane Yolen, waves to the crowd as she rides in the annual Dragon Con Parade. Photo: Jonathan Phillips

(4) SORRY, SON. Did you remember Indiana Jones has a son? Me neither. And no need to start remembering — Entertainment Weekly says “Indiana Jones 5 won’t feature Shia LaBeouf’s character”.

Will an Indiana Jones protege soon snatch the iconic wide-brimmed fedora from atop Harrison Ford’s head? Perhaps, but it won’t be Mutt Williams — a.k.a. Indy’s son, Henry Jones III — the character Shia LaBeouf played in 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

“Harrison plays Indiana Jones, that I can certainly say,” screenwriter David Koepp, who has penned a script for the fifth film in the storied Indiana Jones franchise, tells EW. “And the Shia LaBeouf character is not in the film.”

(5) EATING THE FANTASTIC. Scott Edelman invites everyone to “Chow down on Tortellini Carbonara with James Patrick Kelly” in Episode 46 of Eating the Fantastic.

James Patrick Kelly

James Patrick Kelly is a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning writer who recently published a career short story retrospective as part of the Centipede Press Masters of Science Fiction series. And had I not been turned down by the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in 1974, I might have shared a dorm room with him! (But don’t worry. I was accepted in 1979.)

We discussed the reason he needed to attend the Clarion Science Fiction Workshop twice—and why the rules were then changed so no one could do it again, the suggestion Kate Wilhelm made that saved one of his short stories, why his reaction to comics as a kid was “Marvel, yes, DC, feh,” how the science fiction field survived the Cyberpunk/Humanist wars of the ‘80s, why he takes an expansive view of fanfic, how Cory Doctorow inspired him to enter the world of podcasting early, what allows him and frequent collaborator John Kessel to work together so well, his advice for how writing 10 endings to a story in progress will help writers find the right ending, and more.

(6) GEEKWIRE. Frank Catalano returns with the second podcast in his GeekWire special series on science fiction, pop culture and the arts.

This time, I interview SFWA President Cat Rambo about the new game writer’s Nebula Award, consider the importance of awards in a crowd-sourced recommendation landscape, revisit the Puppies controversy in light of last month’s Hugo results (you’ll recall I wrote about the Puppies for GeekWire two years ago), and get some advice for wanna be writers.

The story (focused on the game writing Nebula) with a link to the full podcast is here: “Game writers to be honored with Nebula Award in first for professional science fiction and fantasy org”.

SFWA President Cat Rambo says the organization began admitting game writers as members last year, and announced a Best Game Writing award category for 2018 to cover works published this year.

“I would think that one of the things a Nebula imprimatur would mean for a game is that it is a game that really has some story to it,” Rambo said. “That it’s a game that can achieve that sort of immersive wonderful experience that only text can bring.”

Rambo, a Seattle writer who is in her second term as SFWA president, sat down with GeekWire for this episode of our new podcast series on science fiction, pop culture, and the arts. Rambo has written more than 200 short stories and been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. Her stories are most recently collected in Neither Here Nor There (Hydra House) and Altered America: Steampunk Stories (Plunkett Press)….

Catalano says, “I have to admit, I’m enjoying mining my science fiction writing background. (And I do provide a full disclosure disclaimer early in the podcast interview that I am a former officer of SFWA, and still-active member.)”

(7) NO BUCK ROGERS, NO BUCKS. The iconic sf character is only making money for lawyers right now: “‘Buck Rogers’ Ownership at Center of Coming Trial”. Two rival estates want those bucks for their own.

The lawsuit is between descendants of author Philip Francis Nowlan, who created the fictional space explorer in the 1920s, and descendants of John Flint Dille, whose newspaper company once syndicated a Buck Rogers comic strip. On Friday, a Pennsylvania federal judge wrote the latest chapter in a long-running contest over rights with a decision that sets up a forthcoming trial over ownership….

“Although the question of whether the commercial success of Buck Rogers owes more to John F. Dille or Philip F. Nowlan is surely of great interest to the parties, and to Buck Rogers fans, it is simply irrelevant to the trademark questions that the trier of fact must answer here,” writes the judge.

The first big trademark question is who had priority on “Buck Rogers.” Who came first to claim “Buck Rogers” as their own? Not Nowlan or Dille, but rather their respective trusts. The Dilles no longer have a valid federal registration, so they must establish prior use of the mark in a way sufficiently public to be identifiable in the minds of the public.

Beetlestone writes that “there is a genuine issue as to whether Plaintiff can establish priority of use in the BUCK ROGERS mark. It must be noted that it is not necessary for Plaintiff to trace its claim to the BUCK ROGERS mark back to John F. Dille or Philip F. Nowlan. Instead, Plaintiff need only point to evidence from which a trier of fact could conclude that it developed trademark rights in the mark prior to January 15, 2009.”

That’s the date the Nowlans filed an intent-to-use trademark application.

The judge notes that the Dilles held registrations on “Buck Rogers” in the 1980s and had licensed those rights for games, comics and books.

(8) CANDID GIZZARD. The BBC reports “Scientists have developed a camera that can see through the human body”.

Scientists have developed a camera that can see through the human body.

The device has been designed to help doctors track medical tools, known as endoscopes, during internal examinations.

Until now, medics have had to rely on expensive scans, such as X-rays, to trace their progress.

The new camera works by detecting light sources inside the body, such as the illuminated tip of the endoscope’s long flexible tube.

(9) BREW HAULER. A true fan: “German waiter smashes beer carrying record – again”. Video at the link.

Oliver Struempfel spent months of training to carry as many full one-litre mugs as possible for a distance of 40m.

(10) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • September 4, 1966 – Gene Roddenberry showed Star Trek’s “Where No Man Has Gone Before” at Tricon, the Worldcon in Cleveland, OH.
  • September 4, 1975 Space:1999 premiered in the U.S.

(11) COMICS SECTION. John King Tarpinian will remember why he recommended this one in a moment: Speedbump.

(12) SECOND VICTIM IDENTIFIED. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has published the name of the second woman injured by chairs thrown from the Atlanta Marriott early Sunday morning during Dragon Con:

Jamie Temple-Thompson Amador, who was dressed as Jessica Rabbit from the movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” was rushed to Wellstar Atlanta Medical Hospital, friend Jennifer Matteson told The AJC.

Both women have been released from their hospitals.

Mattheson said she and Amador drove from Louisiana for their first Dragon Con.

All in all, Matteson said their experience was still positive from the “phenomenal” hotel hospitality to the community.

“The love and support from the Dragon Con family is heart warming to say the least,” Matteson said. “We can’t wait to return for an even better experience, and reconnect with our new Atlanta family!”

Jamie Temple-Thompson Amador

(13) DRAGON AWARDS. At Women Write About Comics, Doris V. Sutherland says “2017 Dragon Awards Are No Longer Puppy Awards”. My mileage may vary.

Despite its recent vintage, the Dragon Awards already have a rocky history. Last year, the awards largely reflected the tastes of a very specific voting bloc: namely, supporters of the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies campaigns that formed to counter perceived left-wing bias at Worldcon’s Hugo Awards.

This led to such ludicrous situations as Brian Niemeier, a Puppy-aligned author, campaigning for his little-known space opera Souldancer to be voted into the Best Horror category for tactical reasons — and winning. L. Jagi Lamplighter, who edited Souldancer and became a finalist this year for her YA novel Rachel and the Many Splendored Dreamlandacknowledged the Puppies’ influence on the Dragon Awards results in 2016: “Puppy fans were eager to vote in a new award and may have been more vigilant than general fans who didn’t necessarily know about the Dragon Awards ahead of time.” Other authors from the Puppysphere, meanwhile, insisted that the Dragons were evidence of their mass popularity with the wider fandom.

However, it seems the farce of the 2016 Dragon Awards can now be consigned to the dustbin of fandom history. The 2017 Dragons have received a much higher turnout of voters and, all in all, they have done a considerably better job of living up to their stated aim of offering “a true reflection of the works that are genuinely most beloved by the core audience.”

This year, the one victory from the Puppy circles was earned by Larry Correia and John Ringo’s Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge, which won Best Fantasy Novel. Correia was the founder of the Sad Puppies campaign and is almost certainly the most popular author to be aligned with the movement, so his success here should not come as too much of a surprise.

(14) NIEMEIER ON DRAGON AWARDS. It’s kind of like watching a dog take a victory lap with one leg lifted.

(15) LOOK OUT. Kevin Standlee got splashed – uh, with vitriol, that is: “They Doth Protest Too Much Methinks”.

I (probably unwisely) tried to ask some of the people crowing over how the recent Dragon Awards are the Best Awards Evar and that The Hugo Awards are dead, dead, dead because of course the only Real Awards are the Dragons, etc., asking why they thought an award that allowed someone with a bit of internet savvy the ability to vote potentially hundreds of times was a good thing, and the amount of vitriol sent my way was, well, not surprising, really. I’m sort of wondering if these people simply assume that everything is corrupt and everyone is on the take. They assumed, after all, that the Hugo Award results were rigged by a Secret Cabal. They don’t care of their pet system is rigged or flawed, as long as they Get What They Want. It’s sort of like the people who were quoted as saying they didn’t care if the last American Presidential election was corrupted, because Their Guy Won, and that’s all that matters.

(16) BACK FROM HELSINKI. Susanna Shore adds to the legion of Worldcon 75 reports in “My #worldcon75 experience”:

The first panel was called Bad Romance. I’d chosen it because I write romance and I don’t want to write it badly, but also because Max Gladstone was on it. He doesn’t strike me as a romance writer, but I like his Craft Sequence fantasy series and wanted to hear him. He turned out to be worth the queuing.

The panel had a hiccupy start as the chair didn’t show up, but a member of the audience volunteered to moderate. She turned out to be Julia Rios, who had won a Hugo Award the previous night for Uncanny Magazine and had partied till four in the morning, but she still managed to be a great moderator. Not only did she keep the conversation flowing, she also managed to live tweet the panel. As a whole, the panel was good and funny, though I didn’t learn anything I hadn’t known before.

(17) MARVEL’S INHUMANS. Sneak peek.

[Thanks to JJ, Mark-kitteh, Chip Hitchcock, Andrew Porter, Cat Eldridge, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson.]

62 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/4/17 Little Miss Muffet Sat On A Pixel. Along  Came A Scroll.

  1. (4) I shan’t be bothered to be deprived of Mutt’s presence in the next Indiana Jones movie, but I will be sad if this means we also don’t get to see more Marion Jones, née Ravenwood — bringing back Karen Allen was pretty much the only thing the fourth movie did right.

  2. (13) DRAGON AWARDS.

    It’s very kind of Doris V. Sutherland to go along with the polite fiction that the 8,000 Dragon Award votes represented 8,000 real individuals rather than 1,000 people, some of them running scripts which used multitudinous e-mail addresses.

     
    (14) NIEMEIER ON DRAGON AWARDS.

    Despite all the Puppies trumpeting that “the Dragon Awards have now killed off the Hugos”, none of them have managed to explain why. The only people who believe the Dragon Awards are more prestigious than the Hugo Awards are the Puppies, and participation in the Hugos has still been rising dramatically since 2011, without any additional help from Correia or other Puppies.

  3. So, Niemeier apparently doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, that James S.A. Corey (especially the one that uses that handle on Twitter – assume that’s Ty Franck) appear to have very similar politics to Scalzi, including a comparable outlook on the state of the genre. They’ve also written a series of books which are full of interesting women, PoC and LGBT characters – often all at the same time – and are arguably enjoying greater commercial success than Scalzi right now thanks to the Expanse being one of the best things on TV (I say with all the authority of someone who watches basically no TV. But I watch that!) But sure, keep piling on the conspiracies about the guy who occasionally wears make-up, maybe Voxy will mention you again on his blog if you do.

    I’m currently reading Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton, and oh wow it is exactly what I need right now. Especially after slogging through Europe in Winter without ever figuring out what that whole series was supposed to achieve…

  4. @JJ —

    participation in the Hugos has still been rising dramatically since 2011, without any additional help from Correia or other Puppies.

    And it looks like participation has actually been rising since about 2008, long before the pups ever considered piddling on anyone’s carpet.

    @Arifel —

    Please don’t try to inflict logic on any of the puppy affiliated. It only makes them whine, yip, and spin in circles.

  5. @Arifel

    You’re in for a treat. After that, you can also see a few chapters from the unfinished sequel here.

    I have to admit that I’ve never entirely warmed to the Europe books. They’re a bit alienating and fragmented, which is entirely deliberate, I know, but nevertheless they’ve not resonated with me the way they obviously have with others, despite the extremely clever setting.
    A new non-Europe-series Hutchinson seems too have landed on my kindle this morning though – the joys of forgetting you’ve preordered something!

  6. 13-14
    I have had Mr. Del Arroz tweeting at me, exhorting me to signal boost the Dragon Awards results (and worse, trying to get me to “Tell Tordotcom” to talk about the results.

    I don’t care. The opacity of the awards, as I have said elsewhere, give me no confidence as to their validity as a gauge of anything. For those who won, well, they have a shiny trophy at least. That’s not nothing.

  7. (13) and (14) The only interesting elements about these articles comes from knowing that their authors would be writing the exact same thing no matter what the outcome of the Dragon Awards were. The whole “Dragon Awards are taking down/rivaling the Hugos” line is an entirely faith-based position, and the authors of these articles would be making that declaration right now no matter what the actual facts are, since the facts don’t actually matter (which is convenient, since there are precious few facts to support any claims about the Dragon Awards being a particularly popular award).

  8. I have had Mr. Del Arroz tweeting at me

    Why oh why have you not blocked his whiny, obnoxious ass?

  9. Just a back of the envelope calculation – using the method the Dragon Awards seem to have used to get their “140,000 nominations” figure, I estimate that the Hugo Awards had roughly 265,000 nominations.

  10. @Mark Ah, thanks for that link! I’m about 30% in now and absolutely loving it. I should probably have given up on Fractured Europe at the second book, but I’d hoped that winning the BSFA meant that Europe in Winter was building somewhere and it just… wasn’t. Not bad, but not for me. I might try Acadie, though – it’s short and in a subgenre I usually love, so ideal to confirm whether the incompatibility is with the series or with Hutchinson in general.

    Ruin of Angels was delivered by the digital preorder fairies today, although it looks like I’ve got a longer wait for the new Toby Daye to find its way into UK ebook format…

  11. @aaron
    Even having gone through all the BS the Puppies threw at me, I managed to never actually block anyone. I just (perhaps foolishly) took it.

    Maybe a part of me feels bad for him, even as most of my mind screams that I really shouldn’t. And then I remember that fever-induced apology I made, thousands of miles from home, to try and get him to lay off my back.

    And then there are people who get far more crap online, every single day, than I.

    At least he hasn’t entered my photo print giveaway contest. That would be awkward if he managed to win.

  12. 13-14) I’m prepared to believe that Survey Monkey did a good job of filtering out people trying to cast multiple ballots. I say that because the Puppy candidates almost all lost in the final vote. That’s what we’d expect; a focused minority can get a nomination or two per category but when they don’t represent popular opinion, they cannot win the final vote.

    That suggests that the Puppies will be unhappy with the Dragons, maybe as soon as next year, because they won’t be awarding the sort of people that the Puppies want to see getting awards.

  13. @Arifel
    I hope you enjoy Tooth and Claw as much as I did. Though The King’s Peace remains my favorite Jo Walton book, for both the discussion of changes in religion and the examination of the work of peace building.

  14. Hello from Houston!

    9 days after water started coming through the walls of the house, I’m headed back to work.

    I’m afraid I haven’t been keeping up, so what’s new and interesting over here at the file?

    I’m re-reading (at the odd moments I haven’t been working hard, talking to well wishers, bureaucrats, insurance people or actively processing what happened) Carve The Sky and Harbors of the Sun (I really hope my hard copy made it), started The Stone Sky and just downloaded A Ruin of Angels.

  15. Paul –

    And then there are people who get far more crap online, every single day, than I.

    No reason to just put up with it though. Muting him wont block him and will reduce the annoyance level.

  16. Re Dragon Awards: Good for them? Even taking reported numbers as fact, the DA are simply a name recognition award. As this is what many canines believed of the Hugos, I am glad that the Dragon Awards exist. Now people who don’t want to read the nominees but just want to vote for the creators have an award. I don’t think that it’s a bad thing, just very different than the Hugos. I just cannot take them seriously, however, until they release nomination\vote data.

  17. “Why oh why have you not blocked his whiny, obnoxious ass?”
    We can block body parts on Twitter now? *possibilities*

    The last pixel on Earth sat alone in a scroll.

  18. @Greg That’s one possibility. But the evidence we have is also consistent with a reading where the administrators threw out the Surveymonkey results and picked the most likely (male) winners from the finalists to avoid further embarrassment. As many have pointed out, we can’t tell for certain without seeing the data; the awards are so new and the track record so patchy that there’s no reason for anyone to take them on trust.

    To be fair, I also lean towards your interpretation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the more pessimistic reading was true, given what we’ve seen so far.

  19. So…um… [scuffs foot self-consciously] … I have a brand new original short story out from Podcastle.org today. It’s “Hyddwen”, the second in my medieval Welsh series, and I just love what the narrator Pip Hoskins has done with it. Check it out. Um…if you want to, that is.

  20. BravoLimaPoppa3: 9 days after water started coming through the walls of the house, I’m headed back to work.

    You had a rough time! Glad you’re back online, and good to know you’ve got work to go back to.

  21. Greg Hullender: That suggests that the Puppies will be unhappy with the Dragons, maybe as soon as next year, because they won’t be awarding the sort of people that the Puppies want to see getting awards.

    As long as they’re losing to Correia and Butcher, complaints of that type are outside the code.

    Instead, I think we can expect to see more of what happened this past month — people campaigning and vote-trading like mad to get nominated, followed by a lot of culture warrior posturing by the nominated puppies, and ending with a gracious congratulatory tweet to the winner of their category which serves to remind everyone their nominated work is in some way the peer of the bestselling winner.

    Sure, they’d like to win themselves, though if that’s not happening they like everyone to visualize them standing on the platform beside Correia, accepting the silver while he takes the gold.

  22. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to suppose that the Dragon administrator (who is not a Puppy-affiliated person as far as I know) would publicly boast of the 8000 ballots, adding up (inaccurately) to 140000 individual votes, if the result had not actually been determined by those votes. So I support the view that this is a real result, not dominated by the RP faction, which implies a relative lack of fraud.

    As for whether ‘the Puppies’ will be happy with these results, it depends which Puppies you have in mind. They seem totally in line with the original Sad Puppy manifesto of rewarding popular works with nutty nuggets, the manifesto which gave us Butcher, Anderson etc., and to which VD continued to pay lip-service with his nominations for King, Brown, de Castell… What they don’t represent, unlike last year’s result, are the specific interests of the RP clique. So anyone who actually supported the SP movement on ideological grounds (and there were such people) should be pleased with them, I think.

  23. Instead, I think we can expect to see more of what happened this past month — people campaigning and vote-trading like mad to get nominated, followed by a lot of culture warrior posturing by the nominated puppies, and ending with a gracious congratulatory tweet to the winner of their category which serves to remind everyone their nominated work is in some way the peer of the bestselling winner.

    Also the petulant demands that said nominations earn them a seat at the big table, and complaints that they haven’t been given that.

  24. I managed to never actually block anyone. I just (perhaps foolishly) took it.

    The block button is your friend. Think of it this way: How much does someone like JDA add that is valuable to your twitter feed? How much annoyance does he cause? Is the first anywhere close to offsetting the second? I don’t see how it possibly could be.

    Maybe a part of me feels bad for him, even as most of my mind screams that I really shouldn’t.

    You really shouldn’t. He’s the architect of any woes he has, and he’s never going to change for the better.

    And then there are people who get far more crap online, every single day, than I.

    The fact that someone else might have things worse than you doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly good reason to subject yourself to unnecessary headache from a slimeball like JDA.

  25. I think it’s a bit of a stretch to suppose that the Dragon administrator (who is not a Puppy-affiliated person as far as I know) would publicly boast of the 8000 ballots, adding up (inaccurately) to 140000 individual votes, if the result had not actually been determined by those votes.

    Why not? It would line up perfectly with the rhetoric that the Dragon Awards have thrown out from their very first press release.

  26. @Aaron
    This is why sometimes I think and act, irrationally, like a Sin Eater. Time JDA spends bothering me are moments in time he isn’t bothering Tor, NK Jemisin, or other more worthy entities than me.
    (Do I have self-worth and confidence issues? You all surely know THAT by now…)

  27. Here’s a solution for the Dragons: make them an overt popularity contest. Eliminate all of the reading, listening and viewing requirements and vote strictly on personalities:

    Favorite White Male SF Author
    Favorite Latino Male SF Author
    Favorite Black Male SF Author
    Favorite Asian Male SF Author
    Favorite Native American Male SF Author
    Favorite Non-Muslim Semitic Male SF
    Author
    Favorite Female SF Author
    Favorite Asian Cartoonist
    Favorite Ex Patriate Publisher
    Favorite Neo Nazi
    Favorite Klansman (note gender)

  28. @Mike —

    Instead, I think we can expect to see more of what happened this past month — people campaigning and vote-trading like mad to get nominated, followed by a lot of culture warrior posturing by the nominated puppies, and ending with a gracious congratulatory tweet to the winner of their category which serves to remind everyone their nominated work is in some way the peer of the bestselling winner.

    So much this. And we’ve already seen it with the puppy Hugo results — the pups who managed to get on the Hugo shortlists brag about their nominations as though they actually meant something about the quality of their work. In fact, I had Niemeier bragging about his Campbell nomination at me just a couple of days ago.

    We know when “Hugo nominated author” in a puppy-gamed year means something and when it doesn’t — and we know that “Dragon nominated author” means nearly nothing given that both years so far have been puppy-gamed. But the general public doesn’t have the same facts in hand that we do, and pups sell their alternative “facts” just as loud and long as they can. And we’ve all seen just how gullible a lot of people are lately!

    @Paul —

    In regards to Arroz — I’m with Paul on this one. I very rarely ban or block or silence anyone. I personally think it’s counterproductive.

    I’m a big believer in the old saying “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” If you ignore what your enemy is saying, then you have no idea what he’s doing or what ammunition he might or might not have against you — and that damages your own state of preparedness.

    Is it annoying to listen to such people? Sure. But knowledge is power.

  29. @Andrew M–

    I think it’s a bit of a stretch to think that the Dragon administrator (who is not a Puppy-affiliated person as far as I know) would publicly boast of the 8000 ballots, adding up (inaccurately) to 140000 individual votes, if the result had not actually been determined by those votes. So I support the view that this is a real result, not dominated by the RP faction, which implies a relative lack of fraud.

    Do we know who the Dragon administrator is?

    If not, what basis is there for assuming they’re not puppy-affiliated in some sense?

  30. The Dragon administrator is Bill Fawcett. I have never seen him mentioned in connection with any of the Puppy campaigns.

  31. @BravoLimaPoppa3 – So sorry about all the water and even more sorry it came through your walls. I’m not sure what you’ve missed, except the brief reappearance of the time machine. Thousands of words about dozens of things?

    @Paul Weimer – I have had Mr. Del Arroz tweeting at me, exhorting me to signal boost the Dragon Awards results (and worse, trying to get me to “Tell Tordotcom” to talk about the results.

    Maybe suggest he start bugging the Dragon Awards admin instead? Because my inbox says they never followed up on their promise to email me the results. Or, you know, don’t, because he’s a complete waste of keystrokes. (Also, as someone with Sin Eater leanings, I’ve found it’s a complete waste of even the least valuable time of even the least valuable person to expend what is actually a useful service in such a useless way. Maybe mute him?)

  32. Time JDA spends bothering me are moments in time he isn’t bothering Tor, NK Jemisin, or other more worthy entities than me.

    I would be willing to bet that Jemisin has JDA blocked. Tor might as well.

    JDA can only bother people on Twitter who don’t block him.

  33. @BravoLimaPoppa3. Sorry to hear about the water. Hope repairs proceed apace.

    Dragon Awards – My general rule is to assume honesty unless given some reason to think otherwise. Right now, I don’t see any reason to doubt that the vote counts given are accurate.

  34. My general rule is to assume honesty unless given some reason to think otherwise.

    There’s plenty of reason to think otherwise. They’ve been playing hide the ball for over a year now. Honest people don’t hide their identities, hide their process, and use rules that lend themselves to easy manipulation.

  35. @Paul Weimer,
    Just mute JDA already. He can still tweet at you but you don’t have to read them. Life is too short.

    Re: Dragons.
    So long as the organisers can ignore the votes and choose the winners arbitrarily (it’s actually in the Terms and conditions state) the Dragon awards are a meaningless sideshow.

    Remember the fuss when the Locus award organisers changed their voting weighting? Despite the goodwill they’d accrued over the years? The Dragons don’t have a fund of goodwill to draw on given their hamhanded efforts to date. At this rate it will take years for the Dragon to gain respectability.

  36. Having just finished reading The Stone Sky, seeing this bit of news seemed a bit eerie – but perhaps I should just shrug it off; the phrase “t’is the season” does spring to mind though.

  37. Watching the build up the the this year’s Dragon Awards process has been pretty interesting this year. There seems to be an effort to take some baby steps towards creating a better and more representative award, and the results certainly look more representative. This is not to say that some of the stumbles on that process, particularly the initial refusal to allow people to not step away from nomination, weren’t troublesome and easily avoided, and not telling nominees such as NK Jemisin wasn’t really problematic, which point to a continued need to revise their process. But, to be honest, I was surprised at the efforts to right some of those issues, and perhaps we’ll see this progress expanded on next year. Although, I still won’t participate, and am hoping to make it out to the next Worldcon because it’s relatively local. (Which is to say, I’m not entirely unsympathetic with Doris Sutherland’s analysis of the awards.)

  38. Soon Lee on September 5, 2017 at 11:40 am said:

    @Paul Weimer,
    Just mute JDA already. He can still tweet at you but you don’t have to read them. Life is too short.

    Yep, and you can be sure those other entities either have him blocked or muted as well. No need to be feel like you have to attend his pity party.

  39. Soon Lee: At this rate it will take years for the Dragon to gain respectability.

    Not necessarily. There are some influential figures going out of their way to speak gently and encouragingly about the award — look at George R.R. Martin’s post about the winners. And the Writers of the Future Contest has decided there’s something for them to gain by participating — several of the award presenters were WoTF judges at DragonCon in that connection. They’re already saying the Emperor is wearing clothes.

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