Pixel Scroll 9/5 Their Eyes Were Watching Cod

(1) As noted by Patrick on Making Light, the Guardian has an editorial about the sudden turnaround in British public opinion regarding the need to help Syrian refugees, “a shift clearly caused by the heartrending photographs of young Aylan Kurdi’s drowned body washed up on a Turkish beach.” More commentary about the main topic in his post, but here’s the reason someone sent me the link —

Likewise, I’m as small-minded and focused on the local as anybody else. Normally the displacement of millions of innocent Syrians tends to weigh on me as merely one of a seemingly endless series of humanitarian crises for which there is never enough attention or care. But put one particular namecheck into a Guardian editorial and you have my undivided attention:

[I]t is also an astonishingly vivid demonstration of the inadequacy of statistics to move our moral sentiments compared with the power of pictures, and still more of pictures that bring to life stories, to affect us in ways that reasoning never could. As the critic Teresa Nielsen Hayden observed, “Story is a force of nature.” One single death and a refugee family have moved a nation to whom 200,000 deaths and 11 million refugees had remained for years merely a statistic, and not a very interesting one at that.

That was…unexpected.

(2) The impression I get from Larry Correia’s “MHI Challenge Coin Update” is that today – the 5th – is the last day to order Monster Hunter International challenge coins. Unlike another famous Puppy, he probably has only one 5th in his deck.

Monster Hunter International challenge coin

Monster Hunter International challenge coin

(3) Steve Davidson ends his new opinion piece about SP4 on Amazing Stories on a satirical note:

But until the event is scheduled, we’ve still got Sad Puppies IV to deal with, because the problem is, as spokesperson for that effort, Kate Paulk’s words do not match her stated intent.

I’ll shortly be announcing the creation of the One True SF/F Award Run by Real Fans for Real Reasons, which will be presented at a soon-to-be-announced convention, the One True SF/F Genre Convention Run by Real Fans for Real Reasons. Which no doubt will be quickly shortened to SFFGCRBRFFRRCon, just as the awards themselves (a silver flying saucer base, above which will be mounted a symbol for science fiction, fantasy or horror that will be crowd-sourced and unique every year) will soon be known as the SFFGCRBRFFRRies.

Everyone attending the convention will receive a ribbon to attach to their ID badge. That ribbon will state that the wearer is a REAL FAN for REAL REASONS. Additional ribbons, containing short, pithy summations of REASONS can be appended to the RFRR ribbons for those who wish greater specificity. Summations such as: “I’m clueless about fandom but it must be doing something wrong because I am not the center of attention”, “Money is the root of all evil, I earn so much I must be Evil”, “The message in my message fiction is that message fiction sucks” and “Someone on the internet told me that someone on the internet is doing it wrong”. For a fee, personal REASON ribbons will be made on site.

(4) Patrick May – “Sad Puppies 4:  A Slate By Any Other Name”

Recommendations will be collected on the Sadpuppies 4 website, where one page will be dedicated to each category. In February or March, Paulk’s stated goal is to post “a list of the ten or so most popular recommendations in each Hugo category, and a link to the full list in all its glory.” Paulk goes on to say “If you want to see your favorite author receive a nomination and an award, your best bet will be to cast your nomination ballot for one of the works in the top ten or thereabouts of The List.”

And therein lies the problem. Even though SP4 is not positioning their list as a slate and even though the organizers plan to provide a recommendation list with more entries than allowed nominees, the approach of ranking the recommendations and suggesting that people vote for more popular works gives the appearance of attempting to game the Hugo nomination process. As we saw at Sasquan, this raises the ire of a significant percentage of Hugo voters. Yes, some people voted against the works themselves and, yes, some people voted against the Sad Puppies personally, but many voted No Award because slates violate what they see as the spirit of the process. Skewing the voting patterns from anything other than purely individual choices will be interpreted similarly.

(5) We interrupt this Scroll to link “If You Were A Platypus, My Dear – A Play In As Many Acts As Is Required” by RedWombat (Part I and Part II)

Puppies: DO YOU SEE THIS ANTI-RURITANIAN SCREED!? IT WON THE HUGE AWARD!

Commenter D: No, it was only nominated—

Puppies: THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE HUGE AWARD!

Troll B: You’re all so racist against Ruritanians.

Commenter B: You’re the one who brought them up in the first place! No one was saying anything about Ruritanians!

Troll B: As an outsider, it’s obvious to me that’s what you were talking about. You should just admit that you all think they’re tax cheats.

Commenters J-Q: …we don’t. No one thinks that. That would be racist.

Troll B: JUST LIKE THAT RACIST PLATYPUS WHO HATES RURITANIANS

FFA: *makes popcorn*

(6) A post on Hackaday admires Sasquan’s Hugo base, made by Matthew Dockery (aka gfish):

A lot of hackers like science fiction. If you aren’t one of them, you might not know that the Hugo is a prestigious science fiction award handed out at the World Science Fiction Convention every year. The statue looks like a rocket ship, but every year the base the rocket ship rests on is different. Kinetic sculptor [gfish] realized the convention would be in Spokane (his hometown and near his current residence) and decided to enter the competition to create the bases. He won, so the 2015 Hugos all have [gfish’s] bases on them and it’s pretty neat that he’s shared the process he used to make them.

And base maker “gfish” takes you step-by-step through the design and manufcaturing process:

The image I had in mind was a kind of spiky, tessellated… something. Rocket blast, maybe, or the central plateau of Washington state, surrounded by mountains. I wanted to leave it ambiguous…

Once I was happy with the design, I needed to find a way to “unfold” it into individual polygons. I had heard of the Japanese papercraft program Pepakura being used by costumers to make armor, so I tried that. It worked — and it even let me test my design in paper first! I’m glad it did, because this let me refine the design in a very fast and cheap way. Things always look different in real life.

I’ve wondered whether people have been shanking themselves on the edges while carrying these Hugos. Flashback: In 1989 Deb Geiser says she cut herself working on a Hugo (mine, as it turned out) and those weren’t sharp at all.

Gfish/Dockery continued a tradition started by Hugo-maker Jack McKnight — missing part of the con to finish working on the awards —

There was a slight panic at the last minute because I sized the holes wrong on one of the nameplates before sending the file to the laser etching service, but that was easily solved with my dad’s drill press. And I missed the masquerade because I was stuck in a hotel room bolting on rockets. But you know what? That was absolutely okay. This is probably the closest I will ever come to winning a Hugo myself, and I loved every minute of it.

(7) Cracked delivers another round of honest movie posters.

little orphan ani

(8) Thomas Olde Heuvelt comments on John C. Wright’s “Hugo Controversy Quiz Questions”

What struck me is your answer to question 6. You state: “Do you remember how science fiction began? We write stories about space princesses being rescued by space heroes from space monsters, pirates, and evil robots. Those who attempt to find a deeper meaning or a social crusade in that are ill informed illwishers whose ulterior motives are unfriendly to our genre.” This much boils down to something I’ve read was part of the main argument for Sad Puppies 3 (I believe it was Brad Torgersen who said it, but I may be mistaken): that they wanted stories about tentacles, not social issues. A pledge for more ‘adventure’, to generalize. Which is a fair argument, I think.

Except… your story that got replaced by mine, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Clause,” is not a story about space monsters or tentacles, it’s a story about a Christmas miracle imposed by God, and fairly evangelical as interpreted by many. (Whether it can be taken as an ‘adventure’ story, is an argument I won’t go into here). I immediately take your word that your intent is not to “indoctrinate the readers into a particular [in this case Christian] worldview” and even “reject that premise with scorn and umbrage”. But I do know that for many who are not Christian (like me), the story *may* read as evangelical and indoctrinating. So, if you didn’t have any agenda and just wanted to tell a good story, the interpretation of indoctrination is purely based on a difference between what is close to you and what is close to non-religious readers. And that, I think, is exactly the same the other way around. I am fairly sure that John Chu didn’t have any political agenda when he wrote a story with gay characters (“The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere”), and I’m a 100% sure that I didn’t have a political agenda when I wrote my first Hugo-nominated story, “The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” (which also happened to feature a gay character). I’ve read many misassumptions that stories like these are always part of some bigger conspiracy to push a social agenda. But that’s nonsense. I don’t have an agenda, except to write what I think are good stories. They may differ from what you think are good stories, and that’s perfectly fine. That’s the real diversity in sciencefiction and fantasy.

Let me state this: people who write different stories than what you know or like, not necessarily have “sad and narrow lives”. You glorify what you know. I glorify what I know. Stephen King glorifies what he knows. Whether it’s God, or a gay tentacle, or an evil clown – as long as they are good stories, who cares?

(9) Otherwise, a typical day at the office for John C. Wright – “More of the Same”

I note that Mr George RR Martin calls for a return to civility in the Sad Puppies debate (http://grrm.livejournal.com/440444.html). I welcome the idea and would not be displeased if the Puppykickers were men of such character as to be able to carry through with it. But I applaud the gesture….

They addicts of Social Justice seek forever to be outraged at some nonexistent injustice, so that they can paint themselves as martyrs and crusaders in a righteous cause, but without the inconvenience of suffering martyrdom or the travail of crusade which would accompany any fight against a real injustice.

One sign of Morlockery is to pen a missive asking one’s foes to abandon their arms and surrender in the name of compromise or civility or somesuch hogwash, while offering nothing, nothing whatsoever, in return, not even basic honesty.

Nor is Mr. Martin in a position to offer anything. Like the Sad Puppies, his side is a loose coalition of likeminded but independent members.

If he refrains from incivility, but his allies do not, I gain nothing by forswearing the use of such colorful terms as ‘Morlocks’ or accurate terms as ‘Christ-haters.’ If I wanted to be bland and inaccurate, I would adopt the flaccid language of political correctness.

And, by an entirely expected coincidence, during the same fortnight as Mr. Martin’s call for civility, we find other members of the SocJus movement busily not being civil or honest:

The surrealistic sensation of finding oneself subject to the two-minute hate for things one did not say by  eager Witch-hunters (leveling silly, false and negligent accusations apparently in hopes of gaining a reputation for zealotry) is not one I would wish on any unstoical soul. In this week’s episode, we find that I call men bad names not because they betray my trust, ruin my favorite show, and seek to worm their sick doctrines into the minds of impressionable children, but because I do not like women befriending women. Who knew?

https://quoteside.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/the-weekly-round-up-592015/

(10) Philip Sandifer – “Weird Kitties: Best Novel Open Thread”

So far, for my part, I’ve gotten through Seveneves, which I thought a good but not great Neal Stephenson novel, and am about a third of the way through The Vorrh, which is very much the sort of novel you’d expect Alan Moore to call “the current century’s first landmark work of fantasy and ranking amongst the best pieces ever written in that genre.” The latter will almost certainly make my ballot; the former could be knocked off without too much trouble. I’ll probably not get to The Shepherd’s Crown, since I’ve not read a Discworld novel in decades, but may well nominate it just because a Hugo ballot without it would just feel wrong somehow.

(11) The argument against reblogging entire posts:

[Thanks to Shao Ping, Mark, Steve Davidson and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

427 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/5 Their Eyes Were Watching Cod

  1. She’s working on another Vatta book, so if you like the spacy side of her writing…

    Ooh, that’s nice to hear! I like that series quite a bit.

    No, leave Shades of Grey on and take off 1Q84!
    No, leave 1Q84 on and take off Anathem!
    No, leave Anathem on and take off AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH

    I’m shocked that this “top books of the last ten years” discussion hasn’t spontaneously morphed into brackets yet. 😉

  2. Robert Whitaker Sirignano: I have gone over Jim C, Wright’s words on today’s scroll, and see he can write more about very little Intended meaning: . Why use five words when I can write fifty?

    I presume you actually mean John C. Wright. Jim Wright’s (not related) posts are usually pretty pithy and on-target.

  3. > “I’m shocked that this “top books of the last ten years” discussion hasn’t spontaneously morphed into brackets yet.”

    “21st Century SFF” would almost certainly be the first of Brackets Mark II if I start running them again at some point.

  4. Sandifer keeps digging:

    I think the best description would be that I am engaging in a sort of readerly empathy. And what’s unique about The Shepherd’s Crown is that I think I’m stuck with readerly empathy, simply because I cannot retcon the last decade of my life to be the sort of committed Discworld reader who can actually experience the weight and impact of the book and what it means. I can only experience that one by imagining myself as a different sort of reader than I am. Even reading the book, I would not be someone for whom it carries the awful and beautiful weight of being a favorite author’s last work.

    In which case, WHY ARE YOU NOMINATING IT? If it doesn’t speak to you (and how can it, when you haven’t read it) why are you nominating it? If you think that you wouldn’t enjoy it properly because you’re not the right sort of reader, why are you nominating it? Don’t you have works that you actually, you know, READ and ENJOYED to nominate?
    Grumbling here because I can’t leave comments on his site.
    Oh, and I *AM* the sort of reader Sandifer is so-kindly “empathising” with. I love Discworld. I just re-read all the Tiffany Aching books so I could read Shepherd’s Crown. I sobbed at various points through it. And you know what? I don’t want his nomination. I, myself, am probably not going to nominate it. Because, unfortunately, I don’t think it’s likely to be Hugo-worthy, unless this is a really weak year.
    Others can disagree. If it knocks their socks off, they should nominate it. But if they never let it get near their socks, they should, in all honor, leave it off their lists. Because how can you measure the apogee of your socks when they’re still on your feet on the ground?

  5. @Cally

    Oh dear. I guess it’s always educational when you watch a smart person talk themselves into doing something that isn’t.

  6. Looking at Sandifer’s blog, I think it’s clearer and clearer that he’s working his way up into doing a slate. In the opening post for Weird Kitties, he explicitly says he isn’t doing a slate, or a semi-slate:

    Weird Kitties is not and never will be a slate. It will never be some sort of stealth “slate by another name.” It will never have an official list of suggestions, of recommendations, or of anything else like that.

    But . . . he says this in the comments:

    As I said, I’ll be using the Year’s End lists to try to identify some natural frontrunners, but there’s never going to be any sort of compiled, ranked list. Those inclined towards tactical voting will be able to find useful information for doing so, but I’m not going to map out any tactics beyond what I already have: nominate five things in every category, and do the research needed for you to be happy with your nominations.

    Which was very troubling, when I first read it, but at least he seemed to be explicitly advocating against slates. But when he says things like:

    My objection is to organized slates designed to dominate the ballot with what is in effect a single person’s choice. Put another way, my opposition is as it always has been: to Vox Day and Vox Day specifically.

    I think Sandifer is almost certainly going to end up using recommendations made on his site to craft a slate. I’m sure he won’t call it a slate, but it will be a slate. I just don’t see any other way to reconcile a logic trail that moves from “This will never be an explicit or implicit slate” to “I’m going to identify the ‘natural leaders’ so people can vote tactically” to “The only problem with a slate is when it encompasses only a single person’s recommendations” to “By the way, I’ve investing time into crafting an increasingly tortured logic scheme for why voting for things you haven’t read is actually a wonderful thing”.

    I won’t take part in Weird Kitties, and I’d recommend that people who don’t want their favorite works tarred by slating (or to inadvertently help someone crafting a slate) to avoid recommending things on his site.

  7. @Cally: Love your response to that dribble by Sandifer. It was a long day of STUFF (grocery shopping and grading sigh), and my brain refuses to do anything with that mess other than WTF????????????

    Also agree with you about TSC (am working up to re-read the series myself so I can re-read TSC as part of it).

  8. @Emma:

    My kitties disapprove of Sandifer as do I.

    If it walks like a slate, talks like a slate, and is numbered like a slate, it’s a slate no matter what bs he tries to spin into candy fluff around it.

    Sheesh.

  9. I’m not all that impressed by the, hrm… If we just knew what it was like to be a graduate student of literature, we would understand. Now, my education got cut abruptly short by stuff, but c’mon, the odds of there not being a single literature grad student criticising voting for something you haven’t read in the Hugo’s? Surely he knows better.

  10. The more I read/hear, the more he sounds like an idiot. Sorry to be harsh, but please. Anad yeah, @Meredith, his appeals to authority as a student (eyeroll) just make him sound full of himself.

    I, too, was bothered by the whole identifying-natural(!)-frontrunners thing, though my first thought was, “Just because some bloggers/reviewers are nominating a few things doesn’t mean others are, so frontrunner seems an odd choice of words.” I hadn’t really jumped to “OMG that sounds suspiciously like a slate” yet. But the more I hear, the more I’m thinking “slate city” (or maybe “slate suburb” since SP4 is “slate city,” really – I’m out here in the sticks of “slateless metropolis”).

  11. I mean, identify the front runners isn’t too hard – Chaos Horizon was decently close this year, although he thought the puppies were going to be weaker than they were.

  12. @Andrew M: (“Dinosaur” and gay-bashing)

    In my experience, a lot of the same bookish guys who became geeks and fans were also tormented in their younger days for those very traits, some of which were seen as effeminate. (Yeah, I got accused of being gay quite frequently in junior high and high school. Attending an all-male institution didn’t really help matters.)

    Couple that with the Mighty J. Manlyman “alpha male” persona the Puppies revere, and they’re primed to see “Dinosaur”‘s central conflict in a curious light: a gang of them-now has put one of them-then in the hospital. (Even the profession of paleontologist fits. What geeky kid never wanted to dig up dinosaur bones?) It becomes a strange expression of self-loathing in that light.

    Plus, on a much shallower level, there are several anti-gay slurs in that section, and the “effeminate geeky scientist” meme is strong. It’s pretty easy for confirmation bias to highlight that and shadow the rest.

  13. This has been nagging at the back of my mind since I read it. From John C. Wright, emphasis added:

    In this week’s episode, we find that I call men bad names not because they betray my trust, ruin my favorite show, and seek to worm their sick doctrines into the minds of impressionable children, but because I do not like women befriending women. Who knew?

    Wait, was that why he was being criticized? Somehow I remember it differently. Let me just check…

    Well, for starters, the linked article didn’t say “women befriending women”, it talked about “Confirming that two female characters in the franchise liked women.” (And not to seem juvenile, but that’s liked liked, not just liked. You know?)

    And given that his original post talks about the show being “an ad for a sexual aberration” and tells the authors “you hate your audience, our way of life, our virtues, values, and religion” and “You are disgusting, limp, soulless sacks of filth. You have earned the contempt and hatred of all decent human beings forever, and we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship” [not quoting any more because it’s making me feel dirty] this seems like a perfect example of how so many Puppies actively try to rewrite history. Even when it’s still there online to be checked.

  14. we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship

    Only now appreciating that this was a rant against a depiction of lesbians.

  15. rrede on September 7, 2015 at 6:45 pm said:

    @Emma:

    My kitties disapprove of Sandifer as do I.

    If it walks like a slate, talks like a slate, and is numbered like a slate, it’s a slate no matter what bs he tries to spin into candy fluff around it.

    He does keep digging the particular hole deeper and deeper on the issue of nominating on the basis of reviews. Whether that was his intent all along (I doubt it) or whether now he has backed himself into a corner justifying his position becomes irrelevant. The nature of the argument means he is now repeatedly advocating that nominating on the basis of reviews is appropriate for the Hugo awards as GENERAL PRINCIPAL

    Phil Sandifer ?@PhilSandifer 8h8 hours ago

    Much more worrisome to me than people relying on reviews for Hugo voting is people equating “the three novels I read” with “the best.”

    …and that sits badly given that Weird Kitties is a project intended to collate reviews. Now the review aspect was the thing I very much liked about the idea and what I thought made it much less slate like than the various other ways that voting next year will become more coordinated* but stuck on a website where Philip Sandifer will probably still be explaining why his original comment regarding Pratchett wasn’t wrong…yeah, not good.

    As I said earlier I don’t think the gist of the notion that you can evaluate books based on information other than directly reading it is wrong (as some wider point about literary criticism and the study of literature not being wholly pointless) but it is a major mistake to apply that argument to the Hugo Awards. The Hugo Awards are about that original dialogue between reader and work (at least for the works categories).

    Put another way: I don’t have to do every experiment myself to sensibly believe a scientific claim but if I’m part of the people actually DOING the experiment then yes I very much really do have to do that experiment – I can’t just copy the results of my lab partner.

    [*it will become more coordinated without any overt slates anyway for multiple reasons]

  16. Lexica on September 8, 2015 at 6:11 pm said:
    This has been nagging at the back of my mind since I read it. From John C. Wright, emphasis added:

    In this week’s episode, we find that I call men bad names not because they betray my trust, ruin my favorite show, and seek to worm their sick doctrines into the minds of impressionable children, but because I do not like women befriending women. Who knew?

    And even if that was hi scomplaint, where the fuck does he get off dictating whether women can be friends or not? Does he does this to his wife as well?

  17. No doubt just stating the obvious, but isn’t JCW just being coy when he talks of women befriending women? Probably because to some degree he knows if he speaks openly of lesbianism using the language he prefers, it’s pretty darn obvious he’s a bigot. Though given that he is saying lesbianism has no place on a TV show some children watch, it’s still pretty darn obvious he’s a bigot.

  18. Shao Ping on September 8, 2015 at 11:05 pm said:
    No doubt just stating the obvious, but isn’t JCW just being coy when he talks of women befriending women? Probably because to some degree he knows if he speaks openly of lesbianism using the language he prefers, it’s pretty darn obvious he’s a bigot. Though given that he is saying lesbianism has no place on a TV show some children watch, it’s still pretty darn obvious he’s a bigot.

    That’s definitely a possibility after his ‘I can’t be a homophobe because I’m not scared of them’ rants. Like every case of Wright inadvertently doubling down while trying to explain his position, he just reveals another horrible attitude. I hope for his wife and children’s sakes he’s worse online than in person

  19. re: Weird Kitties and SP4
    They both feel like there is a tinge of a tactical voting aid. I am glad for the reviews but I hope people read widely and vote their taste. I don’t know if I should use either.

  20. Some years you just do not read an eligible book you think worthy of a Hugo. Most years in my case. New releases are seldom new by the time I get round to them. If that happens do not nominate and do not vote. do not depend on someone else opinion. If you happen to have read all the books on the ballot. and did not think any of them worthy then a vote of no award is appropriate. The Hugo is a place you to voice your considered opinion, not a friend opinion, not a reviewers opinion but an informed opinion, your informed opinion.

  21. JCW: we will do all we can to smash the filthy phallic idol of sodomy you bow and serve and worship

    Jim Henley: Only now appreciating that this was a rant against a depiction of lesbians.

    Oh drat, I was sure that was another rant about the Hugo award.

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