708 thoughts on “Santa Claus vs. P.U.P.P.Y. 6/25”

1. I am rooting hard for TGE, myself.

   Brian, I don’t agree with 99% of your post, but you stuck to “I” instead of “we” statements for everything but the bit about mammals, which is unarguable unless you believe in lizard people. Good job!

   *clicker*

2. [Torgersen] was actually fighting to get his mates onto the ballot

   Always remember this. Sad Puppies 3 is not about politics. It is not about racism, or sexism, or the American Culture War, or dissatisfaction with current trends in narrative style. It is 100% about cronyism.

3. (that said, it’s certainly been sold as political culturewar. But it’s still just cronyism and self-puffery. GAMERGATERS, IF YOU REALLY WANT TO MAKE THE SJWS CRY, YOU’LL EACH SEND ME $10!!!)

4. Laertes at 8:51 pm:

   “I hope so. I’m voting for TGE. I can’t explain why I loved it so much, but I did. I felt fiercely protective of that book, like it was some precious fragile thing that shouldn’t exist but miraculously does. That response is totally irrational and idiosyncratic and I make no attempt to justify that vote on artistic grounds. That emotional response is so unique and baffling to me that I’m voting just on that basis alone.

   TGE pushes a lot of buttons for me and it’s not only because it is so well written; there is a lyrical rhythm to the story. It’s also the themes: the use & misuse of power & non-violent solutions, grace, and forgiveness, they all resonate..

5. “I am getting pretty damned tired of Brian Z sucking so much energy out of this community.

   This.

   “To be honest, he’s convinced me to support EPH. If he had any actual arguments against it, he would have used them. Just as your hypothetical tobacco lobbyist would have–had there actually been a case for safe use of tobacco”

   And this.

   You can’t have a good faith discussion with Brian about any of this because he will lie about what he said and you said later. People interested in conciliation do not do that.

   Also, I must be alone in not being impressed by anything Kary English has said about her not withdrawing her nomination or the slates in general. No one will force you to withdraw, Kary. No one will force me to admire your moral fortitude in not doing so.

6. @ Laertes

   I hope so. I’m voting for TGE. I can’t explain why I loved it so much, but I did. I felt fiercely protective of that book, like it was some precious fragile thing that shouldn’t exist but miraculously does.

   I felt the same way. I loved Sword and expected to put that first, but TGE hooked me. I put TBP third because I loved it, but the characters didn’t gain my affection the way Breq and Maia did.

7. Also, I must be alone in not being impressed by anything Kary English has said about her not withdrawing her nomination or the slates in general. No one will force you to withdraw, Kary. No one will force me to admire your moral fortitude in not doing so.

   Ann, regardless of how one feels about Kary’s decision to not withdraw, it would be less than courteous to shove that in her face. She’s been reasonably pleasant about this whole mess, after all, unlike some others. One can simply refrain from praising her.

8. Soon Lee:TGE pushes a lot of buttons for me and it’s not only because it is so well written; there is a lyrical rhythm to the story. It’s also the themes: the use & misuse of power & non-violent solutions, grace, and forgiveness, they all resonate..

   I’ve only grown more fond of TGE as the Hugos mess unfolded. Before that it was already a much needed salve after a full decade of overly dark, grim, cynical grimdark. In the context of the Hugos it demonstrates some other virtues that are sorely lacking in some corners.

   I hope it wins, but more than that I hope it sets certain pendulums swinging the other way.

9. XS

   Oh, YES. Soooo tired of all the grim. I’ve been enjoying some of the more recent grinlight.

10. “One can simply refrain from praising her.”

    Why should I stay silent? Is praise the only acceptable option? I don’t hate the woman or think she’s evil, but I am, as I said, completely unimpressed by what she’s said on the issues. I think she’s being self-serving, as she is by not withdrawing when her nomination is the result of cronyism, not actual merit. If she wins, her win is forever tainted, so why would any sensible author want to win that way?

    I wish someone would write up a list of this blog’s sacred cows, so I’ll know which ones I must never criticise, lest I bring the wrath of Bruce down on my head.

11. @XS,

    Oh yes. It was a timely read for me; I’d just finished slogging my way through the Novellas in the Hugo Packet and the contrast was illuminating.

12. RedWombat
    *clicker*
    Oh, you should definitely pull up a chair and come sit by me. ;-D

13. Estee, my wife liked those Beatrice Potter books, too. Embarassingly twee is a good description. 😉

14. @Ann Somerville: I’m with you on this one. English is very likely to win because she’s twice a beneficiary of the puppy campaign–they put her mediocre story on a ballot it wouldn’t otherwise have been on, and they filled the other four slots with rubbish.

    Unless the principled anti-slate vote is far larger than I expect, she’ll win easily.

    I’ve got some sympathy for her, though. She wouldn’t be simply declining the nomination–decency requires that she give up a near-certain win. That’s a lot to ask.

15. Gabriel F.: Aside from L. Ron Hubbard and Vox (who both got onto the ballot via some dirty pool and were quite rightly shut down for it) who else has been the lucky recipient of No Award prior to any possibles this year? Anyone?

    http://www.comicmix.com/2015/04/29/glenn-hauman-hugo-awards-no-awards-and-network-effects/

    Here’s a snippet…

    And ironically, that’s really a shame. Because it turns out there was a really great science fiction movie that year that showed us where we were heading. I’m not talking about any of that year’s actual Hugo nominees– Carrie, Logan’s Run, The Man Who Fell to Earth, or Futureworld.

    No, I’m talking about Network.

    […]

    If you’ve never seen it, let me give you a quick recap. Peter Finch won a posthumous Best Actor award for playing a man named Beale, a media personality who’s becoming less and less popular with the public, until he undergoes a nervous breakdown and believes God is speaking to him directly….

    Read the whole thing.

16. Books that someone who loved the Southern Reach Trilogy would love?

    House of Leaves (Mark Danielewski) comes to mind. There is a similar sense of exploring a place of uncanny mystery that is inimical to the explorers, and a similar lack of answers – again, more of a chronicle of experiencing the weird rather than figuring it out. Much more “meta” than Annihilation et. al., with footnotes and unorthodox text alignment and several layers of nested story-frames.

    (To Charon D. back on Page 8 of The Hammer of Tor: Have to concur with your previous informants: I cannot imagine how the experience could translate to ebook. However, saving it for bedtime might be a mistake, depending on how it takes you. I devoured it over the course of two near-sleepless nights, the latter sleepless because after closing the book I lay in bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling, utterly certain that the walls of my bedroom were about to start closing in on me.)

17. Estee at 8:48 pm:

    Heinlein, All You Zombies

    Hasn’t it recently been made into a movie? I think I saw something about that but can’t remember what or when or where.

    Yep, “Predestination”. I loved it & would have nominated it had I seen in in time; it had a limited 2014 release. There’s a proposal for its eligibility to be extended at this year’s Business Meeting.

18. Also, I must be alone in not being impressed by anything Kary English has said about her not withdrawing her nomination or the slates in general. No one will force you to withdraw, Kary. No one will force me to admire your moral fortitude in not doing so.

    I am a bit curious about how after August, when we know which legitimate nominees were pushed off the ballot by the chicanery in which she was a willing participant, what she plans to say to the people who should have been nominees. For that matter, how warmly those colleagues she helped cheat out of nominations will react to her. At least it will be an icebreaker at parties.

19. Honestly, Kary’s story was the best of a bad lot… but that’s a very low bar. I didn’t think it was even close to the best short I read that year, so there goes your ball game. I feel like Kary’s having her cake and eating it too at this point, but I might have given her the vote anyway if her story was exceptionally good. It just wasn’t.

20. @Stevie

    Your ability to survive and thrive in the face of such a disease is impressive. It is apalling that anyone lacks empathy to such a degree that they would consider the regimen of care you describe as “doesn’t look hugely difficult.”

    I hope that I will remember this if I ever find myself judging someone based on what they choose to read or not read. I can talk about what makes a work one of the best in SFF and worthy of a Hugo without feeling I am in a position to judge someone who chooses to read it or to avoid it.

    [For best stories, has no one mentioned “Bicentennial Man” or any other amazing Asimov robot story? I would add “The People of Sand and Slag” by Paolo Bacigalupi to my list. I read “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” when I was about 10 and never forgot it.]

21. Pup on a Hot Slate Roof

    Sweeny Terrier: The Demon Nominator of Slate Street
    Sunday in the Bark With Beale
    West Side Slates
    Pupany
    A Puppy Thing Happened on the Way to the INB Performing Arts Center
    Anyone Can Widdle
    Do I Hear a Whine?
    Collies
    A Little Slate Music
    Rabid Overtures
    Merrily We Logroll Along
    Flounce
    Ass-ass-ins
    The Dogs

22. @Glenn Hauman: Network

    Good God that nearly had me choking on my own tea. 😀

    Nicole J LeBoeuf-Little: House of Leaves

    Everything I’ve heard about it paints it as doing everything right about Internet meta creepypasta taken up to 11. I believe it was one of the major influences on the SCP Foundation.

    It’s on my reading list for this year. …which is sad because it’s almost a full decade after I’ve had the kinda-sorta companion album for it that the author’s sister released around the same time: Poe’s Haunted.

23. Puppy, Puppy, Do You Read?

24. @Ann & Laertes, re Kary English: ditto. Polite conversation does not excuse unethical behaviour.

25. I think House of Leaves should have been about a third shorter – there are too many places where a schtick is just repeated multiple times and I can’t see what the repetitions contribute. It is nonetheless an engaging, eerie work, and I’ve read it several times and felt the time mostly well spent each time.

26. @BrianZ: This may be wasted effort, but pixels are cheap.

    (Warning: This is going to be long. Quite long.)

    So I’m going to explain to you, in detail, why your language isn’t lining up with what you claim to want.

    Consider this a tribute to “To Read the Dispossessed” or “The American Shore”.

    “In the early days of April, fandom was plunged into war”

    We’ll start here: You make it sound as if some force *outside* fandom plunged it into war, or it just “happened”. By removing the names of the agents — and there were certainly agents who took active steps to do things they expected to draw results, Sad and Rabids alike — you appear to be downplaying their role. To people who saw it as “This thing happened and one group were crowing about doing it.”, this comes across as at best ignorance, at worst Puppologia.

    “…and they were being attacked from Boing Boing to Entertainment Weekly as a group of unrepentant racist misogynist neo-**** homophobes”

    Your antecedent here, in the text, for “they” is “fandom”. Not the Puppies-as-individuals, nor even the Puppy leaders. “Fandom”. Again, this presents them as a) representative of fandom as a whole, and, indeed, gives them pride of place within it, as opposed to the people that they have been attacking, and over whom they were gloating.

    (It is worth noting in a sidebar that while, for example, VD, JCW, and Tank Marmot (along with BT & LC) were being called things like that, the text you are using as your model here (Gallo, 2015)* was not generally known in “the early days of April”, but rather after its deliberately-timed strategic release by one of the people you are painting, implicitly, as a victim here.

    “Still, SP3 organizers did offer a rationale and at least a semblance of a semi-apology.”

    Actually, the problem is SP3 organizers have offered multiple rationales, none of which agree with each other. Hence why, in the sentence you quoted of mine, I mentioned a coherent rationale.

    And the “apology” you cite is only to the people LC feels are “innocent” — in other words, not those who disagree with him, or those who opine against him. This is not an apology for the actual behavior; this is an apology for those he feels are “caught in the middle” of a situation he engendered.

    “and when we are attacked it is far too easy to double down rather than face up to our mistakes.”

    This is true. On the other hand, if one is presenting one’s self as the leader of a movement, one takes on responsibilities above and beyond normal people, would you not agree?

    Here is another place where it appears all sympathy is going towards the Puppies, and none towards the people whom they have hurt. Adding a sentence stating that, for example, Irene Gallo had risen above Correia and Torgerson’s behavior with her apology, even though this was not a situation of her making, would help correct this — if this is something you wish to correct.

    “But I think the SP3 leaders deserve some credit for acknowledging the situation while under fire.”

    And one can give them that credit while also recognizing that the fire was justified — or recognizing that they were dishing it out as well, to other people. The moment I lost sympathy for BT was his treatment of Juliette Wade — how do you feel about that? If you have discussed it, I have missed it.

    ” But I did find the volley of incessant attacks (the pace has now mercifully slackened) appalling”

    As has been pointed out, there was no let-up in attacks from the Puppies (Rabid in particular, but also Sad) — so why do you, again, appear to find only one side appalling, and the other “deserving of some credit.”

    Do you not see why this makes you look, whether you mean to or not, as a prime Puppy apologist?

    “as was the apparent trend of holding SP3-slated organizers, authors, or fans, responsible for everything Vox Day, or John C. Wright, has ever said or done.”

    Yet we have heard no remarks about the reverse — or, for that matter, the very principle embodied in Puppydom, that there is some “SJW” enemy to be dealt with, which does exactly the same thing in a formal and organized way.

    If I discovered that a voluntary associate of mine (say, a fellow con-organizer) had opinions like JCW, and my friends called me on it, my response would indeed be one of dissociation — though I would be surprised if anyone got that close expressing themselves that loudly. (Which is another feature here; it takes an impressive level of ignorance or willful not-paying-attention to miss the views of people like Beale, Wright, or Marmot.)

    The reason people call you a troll, or a Puppy apologist, is that despite what you claim is the reason for your texts, every rhetorical choice you make — both of commission and omission — comes down on the “pro-Puppy” side. If this is not your intent, you should make it clearer.

    (Just as, in answer to your question, I would find a “Women in SF” slate as unacceptable as the Puppies — purely for slate reasons.)

    Another example can be found here: ” Personally, I’ve raised specific concerns about EPH (the timing makes it feel deliberately exclusionary,”

    Once again, this is a case where the “feelings” you are presenting as general are, in fact, those of the Puppies (potentially) — so see above regarding your use of Puppies and fandom as interchangeable. This is a small slip — but it once again makes people feel like you’re not concerned with anyone *but* the Puppies, no matter what you say otherwise.

    I hope this has helped you understand why you’re being treated the way you are, if you need to understand. You claim to be opposed to slates, to Rabid Puppies, etc. I hope this little explication has helped you to better approach your ideal text.

    *No, I am not going to present a proper bibliography. My delight in academe does not go quite that far.

27. Now that I think about it, she benefits thrice from puppy behavior. First they put her on the ballot. Second they surround her work with rubbish. Third, they behave so hatefully that ordinary civilized behavior seems praiseworthy by comparison.

28. Gabriel F. Honestly, Kary’s story was the best of a bad lot… but that’s a very low bar. I didn’t think it was even close to the best short I read that year, so there goes your ball game. I feel like Kary’s having her cake and eating it too at this point, but I might have given her the vote anyway if her story was exceptionally good. It just wasn’t.

    It’s going to be interesting if she does win. VD is going to be crowing in his usual idiotic fashion that he’s “responsible” for it winning. Ms English is either going to have to agree with him – in which case she should have withdrawn – or she’s going to have to defend her story as being better than the two or three top choices pushed off by the Puppy slate. Which may be difficult.

29. To All:

    Regarding File 770 Short Fiction Recommendations.

    Right, that’s about a 24 hour period.

    From Steven Schwartz on June 25, 2015 at 9:43 pm to the last recommendations made by Estee on June 26, 2015 at 8:48 pm.

    Including My Five:

    Iain M. Banks: “State of the Art” (because no list is complete without Culture)
    Harlan Ellison: “The Deathbird” (simply my favorite by my favorite)
    Robert E. Howard: “Red Nails” (because, well Conan, eh? Plus Barry Windsor-Smith!)
    Catherynne M. Valente “Silently and Very Fast” (Because she’s brilliant, right?).
    Jeff VanderMeer: “The Transformation of Martin Lake” (Oh man, this story!).

    Plus *Bonus Story*: Nick Mamatas: “Joey Ramone Saves The World”

    I think we’ve set a New Guinness World Record for Most Nominations in a 24 Hours Period! (And if there isn’t a category for this, There! Should! Be!).

    Final Numbers: 376 Unique Nominations, including 45 that had multiple recommendations.

    Top 15 by number of times recommended:

    1. “Flowers for Algernon,” Daniel Keyes – 12

    2. The Women Men Don’t See, James Tiptree Jr. – 7

    3. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, LeGuin – 6
    4. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson – 6
    5. “A Rose For Ecclesiastes,” Roger Zelazny – 6

    6. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” by James Tiptree Jr. – 5
    7. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream Harlan Ellison – 5
    8. Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution” – 5
    9. Harrison Bergeron, Kurt Vonnegut – 5

    10. Bradbury, All Summer in a Day – 4
    11. Bloodchild, by Octavia Butler – 4
    12. When It Changed by Joanna Russ – 4
    13. “Story Of Your Life”, Ted Chiang – 4
    14. “The Screwfly Solution”, Tiptree Jr. – 4
    15. A Dry, Quiet War by Tony Daniel – 4

    This is part of the list that I ripped today for future reading material. If you’re interested in the whole thing leave a note and we’ll see what we can do.

    Ah, the combined wisdom of the Collective. Yeah, we’re pretty shit-hot.

    Regarding Puppygate, which keeps going, and going, and going…

    As for me, I do have to admit I’m becoming rather sanguine, in fact, I *think* I’m beginning to see my way clear to returning to my normal semi-comatose state, thank Ghod!

    You see, when I bought my supporting Membership this year, I knew I had two responsibilities according to Saint George and The Scalzi:

    Firstly: To vote my conscience with due consideration for the literary worth of each nomination and with a distinct nod at the quality of past winners.

    Secondly, to nominate quality works for next years Hugo Awards, and with a little help from my friends I do think I will have that well in hand.

    But like many freshly drawn into Puppygate, my objections basically boiled down to: ‘Slates Bad!’ – Ok, and so EPH settles that quite nicely (Yes, I always knew that minds immeasurably superior to my own were looking down with a dim and jaundiced view upon Puppygate). And as far as righting any past inequalities, I believe the Saga Proposal is a step to the good. Granted there are those who have a vested interest in keeping the hullabaloo going, but personalities aside, Mr. Beale is beginning to look to me like a Lame Duck Dark Lord. I’m quite sure he has any number of ‘outrages’ planned for the foreseeable future but, eh, whatever.

    It’s been said before, but I came for the war and stayed for the recommendations.

    Right, bedtime for Bonzo…

30. @Bruce – I loved the main story in House of Leaves while wanting the framing element and the narrator to be eaten by wolves. I started skipping his bits to get back to the house, because screw that guy.

    I know it’s fashionable to dismiss likable protagonists, but I refuse to spend that much time with someone I hold in contempt, which I reached very quickly with him.

31. @Jonathan K. Stephens

    So do we have enough data there to do a test-run of EPH? 🙂

32. @Brian

    In the early days of April, fandom was plunged into war and they were being attacked from Boing Boing to Entertainment Weekly as a group of unrepentant racist misogynist neo-**** homophobes bent on denying awards to all but white men.

    I agree with Steven. Fandom was not under attack. A pack of assholes was under attack.

33. RedWombat: No argument from me. There’s one really powerful section with him, where he describes (spoiler proofing) trggvat gerngzrag naq fhccbeg naq ortvaavat gb erpbire, naq gura vg’f nyy whfg n qnlqernz naq ur’f onpx va gur guvpx bs vg. That really worked for me. (Oh, also, the letters from his mother.) But mostly…too many people I’ve cared about, including close relatives, have turned into self-destructive jerks without any particular reward or reason for me to feel like spending much time on it in entertainment.

34. Steven: Well I’m Hoping… Mike?

35. How to Deal With Brian: A Personal Rule

    Treat him as fine until his Making Shit Up/ MSU (thx to JJ for this I think) tendency kicks in, where he is misleading/ misquoting/ misrepresenting his/ someone elses’ arguments, or reality. Call him on it. Ignore rest of the post/ chain,until/ unless he is accurate in a different post/chain. Repeat.

    Main reason for this is to at least avoid his MSU to mislead anyone else. Secondary reason is that I find his substantive comments to be terrible, and I’d feel bad if there wasn’t some effort on my part to push back.

    For the most recent one, MSU kicks in on the second paragraph:

    In the early days of April, fandom was plunged into war and they were being attacked from Boing Boing to Entertainment Weekly as a group of unrepentant racist misogynist neo-**** homophobes bent on denying awards to all but white men. Still, SP3 organizers did offer a rationale and at least a semblance of a semi-apology.

    Brian, was fandom being attacked, or was a small and sad/rabid faction reaping the rewards of their actions?

    Were the reports from BoingBoing & EW (that paragon of journalistic integrity) a cause or an effect? If the latter, what was the cause? Was it something that that small sad/rabid faction did?

    Finally, how does something where the following is stated a “semi-apology”:

    Note, that isn’t an apology.

    Brian, stop misrepresenting others/ reality/ yourself in your posts please. Thanks.

36. It’s funny you should mention his MSU. That’s how I first met him.

    Over on ML, there was a thread about EPH in its larval form. The room was full of people taking the mission seriously and being scrupulously fair about their objective: Break the power of slates and restore the condition where every tendency, including the puppies, has strength in proportion to their numbers.

    One over-eager hothead would often drift off-mission and say hateful things about the puppies, and was routinely chastised for this by the rest of the room. “Look, buddy, that’s not what this is about. Grind that ax someplace else.”

    One commenter told the guy that his hateful quotes were turning up on puppy boards, as evidence of the evil intentions behind EPH, and so could he please knock it the hell off?

    Brian Z then burst upon the scene by appearing here at File 770, claiming that the evil goons at ML were silencing one of their own for being too friendly to puppies.

    Near as I can tell, he’s nine parts lies and one part ingenious filk.

37. “Brian Z then burst upon the scene by appearing here at File 770, claiming that the evil goons at ML were silencing one of their own for being too friendly to puppies.”

    That’s what I’m suspicious of. A few pages back he was touting his progressive beliefs, and is very proud to be supporting small presses and so on. At the same time, he’s always eager to bring us the latest tripe from VD hot off the press, and to defend the fool’s willingness to argue as a virtue – and I ask myself, would a decent, semi-progressive, fair-thinking person spend any time on Vox’s blog? I mean, once you realised what it was?

    And yet Brian not only spends time there, he seems to think that a bunch of us – the very people who Vox hates with a fiery passion (LGBT folk, educated women, liberals etc) – who avoid reading Vox as much as possible, and certainly don’t hang around his blog, are panting at the leash (sorry) to read his master’s “friend’s” every gobbet of hate.

    So either Brian is so utterly insensitive that he hasn’t noticed the dissonance between what he claims to believe and what he does, is so thick that he can’t understand what’s being said to him, or he’s some kind of fifth columnist devoted to presenting the ‘kinder, gentler’ face of Vox to a group of people who would not spit on VD if he spontaneously combusted in front of them.

    Since his filk suggests he is not stupid, and his taste in books admits of some claim to sensitive feelings, I suggest we are left with the third option – that he’s an agent of Vox’s, and think he’s going to persuade us to VD’s way of seeing things. (Or wear us down until we die of frustrated anger.)

    In any event, I take his claims of progressive beliefs with a bucket of salt. They are not in evidence, but his addiction to the words of VD are.

38. Near as I can tell, he’s nine parts lies and one part ingenious filk.

    People give him a lot of slack for the filks, but I haven’t seen much filking from him lately. Unless this is some strange Shatner-esque spoken word parody.

39. Jonathan K. Stephens: If you know how to test it and want to do so, I’m willing to run your results. Or you could just work up the raw list and worry about a test after that. (Did you get my reply to your e-mail?)

40. Yeah, but his Casey at the Bat was good enough to win him a reputation for filk all by itself.

    It really was special.

41. I suspect Brian’s filks are like fur and purring in cats – hides the fact that underneath it all, they’re dedicated, relentless killing machines.

    Just saying…

42. Mike + Jonathan,

    It’s pretty likely that the top five on the list would also be the winners under EPH.

    There’s a multiple tie for sixth place on numbers of “nominations”, so it will be interesting to see how EPH would sort that out.

43. Okay, gang, I give you:

    Brian Z Bingo

    Save that URL so you can generate your own card next time we play.

44. Jonathan K. Stephens: This is part of the list that I ripped today for future reading material. If you’re interested in the whole thing leave a note and we’ll see what we can do.

    Would it be possible to post it in a spreadsheet at Google Docs? (to create a new one, just click the red “+” button on the bottom right, then paste in your own data.)

    I was going to do this, until you posted that you’d already done it. Thank you so much for all the work.

45. @ Laertes

    That’s the best!

46. Laertes: Okay, gang, I give you: Brian Z Bingo. Save that URL so you can generate your own card next time we play.

    *snort* Oh, that is effing priceless.

    I wish I’d have thought of it — I’d have won ALL THE PRIZES by now.

47. House of Leaves might not work as an ebook, but there’s a very good fanfic for it – a crossover with Sherlock Holmes – that works quite well in Livejournal, with creative use of comment threads.

48. Oh! Hey!

    Open a browser tab, go to Google, and paste in

    supreme court same sex marriage

    I am so happy that so many people now have equal rights to marrige.
    (I just hope they do a better job picking a partner than I did.)

    I am also very happy that that SCOTUS knocked back that pesky attempt to deny Americans the ability to obtain reasonably-priced healthcare.

    Some day, this country might actually make it into the 21st century with the rest of the world.

49. @Laertes
    It limped onto the ballot despite the best efforts of the puppies to keep it off, and when it wins, and even the puppies admit that it’s a worthy winner despite their interference, I can’t imagine they don’t die of shame on the spot.

    That assumes they’re capable of shame, a proposition for which we haven’t seen an abundance of evidence.

50. Carrie, Logan’s Run, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Futureworld … okay, I can see why the voters No Awarded everything in the Dramatic category that year; even Carrie, because it’s a horror movie, and The Man Who Fell to Earth, because Nic Roeg is an esoteric taste. But it stands as a reminder of the state of SF cinema before Star Wars: Even with only four slots in the Best Dramatic Category, they had to resort to something like Futureworld to fill it.

    And Logan’s Run was a prestige MGM release…

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