Do you want to liveblog along? Comment on the proceedings? This is the place for it. Jump right in. Play along from home.
Just this moment I am sitting in the back of the hall where the pre- and post-Hugo show will be broadcast. But I soon will migrate to the auditorium. They fixed me up with a seat in press row, which was very kind.
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But if they didn’t lose to No Award, what were they going to lose to? “Totaled” wasn’t Hugo-worthy but it was the best thing the Puppies allowed us to vote for.
You don’t get a Hugo for “being a decent person.” (Though being a complete jerk makes it harder, I grant you. Some people have talent enough to overcome that handicap, but the handful of complete jerks among the Puppies aren’t that talented.)
@Doctor Science – Ireland did go through a small rough patch between 1921 and 1980, in fairness. Whereabouts in Tipp was she from?
> However, in the literary categories I never heard a positive mention of any Puppy nominees here or elsewhere
James M – I really, really, really liked _Totaled_, which was a puppy nominee. (It’s also the only story in its category which I ranked above ‘No Award’,)
I don’t know about that.
A lot of people who are most upset about the Hugo Awards being used for a culture war would have familiarity and/or affection for the word “fuggheads.” I know it from reading a bunch of fanzines from first fandom. F. Towner Laney was particularly fond of it.
@corwin
I also hope a lot of people use their nomination next year, but be aware that a slate boosts nominating power tenfold, and Puppies are (at a best guess) more than 10% of the final voters. More people nominating is only part of the solution; some kind of technical system to limit the power of slates will also be important.
Could some kind soul re-link the instructions for blocking select people in Safari? I can’t dig it up now, and am sick/worn enough today to want it. Thank you.
> Due to his politics or his style? Honestly.
His style, definitely.
I liked _Count to a Trillion_. But I haven’t really enjoyed any of his other works – something which was true well before I knew his politics – and I found his nominated short fiction unreadable.
Tastes differ. That’s ok. But one of the most irksome things about this whole fight is the way your side keeps insisting that my taste isn’t *real*, that I’m somehow not basing my decisions on what I enjoy reading but rather on something else. It’s profoundly irritating behavior and makes me *want* to kick you.
In 6th place for Best Novella nominations:
124 | The Slow Regard of Silent Things | Patrick Rothfuss | 11.4%
That would’ve been such a well-deserved Hugo nomination (and win?) Such a thoroughly lovely, beautifully crafted work.
Maybe a few years from now we can do a ‘retro’ Hugo for the no award categories of this year and the next…?
Thanks all for the live-commenting you did here. Tiding me over until a recording of the ceremony is released… (Wish timezones had been kinder to me.)
Just seen the results and don’t want to work through 840 comments (which will likely be over a thousand by the time I catch up) before chipping in, so apologies if I’ve been beaten to it:-
(1) awards for Chinese and Dutch writers – the Puppies must be so pleased that their commitment to diversity has been rewarded (/sarcasm). Even if their efforts would have kept both off the ballot.
(2) an Ellisonian offering for when we get back to titling the daily roundups: The Whimper of No-Awarded Puppies. (that’s been in my locker since the days of the Puppy Roundups, but I didn’t want to tempt fate).
Overall, though , it seems to be an outcome that most people here will be able to live with, given what was on offer once nominations closed (with the caveat that there will be plenty who can reasonably feel that a different winner of Best Novel would have improved things; but with three strong candidates that’s only a minor quibble)
I don’t know about you guys but I’m going to buy a book to celebrate.
When it comes to the Puppy slates and quality – I decided that, except for nominations for Vox Day and material published by Castalia Press, I would look at the material in the Hugo packet for all the Puppy nominations and judge it on its merits. I didn’t even use particularly high standards for judging work against No Award – just that it should be no worse than might normally get shortlisted in a non-Puppy year and that I would put No Award in first place in a category if otherwise the top work would be something I would normally never expect to vote higher than fourth. Also, I didn’t vote at all in the BDP categories – hadn’t seen any of the nominees and didn’t have time to do so.
The result? I looked at 40-odd Puppy nominations, and put only nine above No Award. And only two of these went above a non-Puppy nominee. And the only one I felt might really be worth a Hugo (as distinct from probably not being the worst Hugo winner ever) was Sheila Gilbert.
And, yes, my definition of merit probably is a bit politically biased leftwards. But, against this year’s Best Novel shortlist, I would have found a work of the calibre of, say, The Mote in God’s Eye an almost undeniable winner. None of this year’s Hugo nominees in any category was of quite that standard – but the non-Puppy nominees generally came a lot closer than the Puppy ones.
@SocialInjusticeWorrier
Fair enough points. What though would be a valid victory condition?
I’m not asking at what point we should forgive her, just wondering at what point we can stop bringing her up every other day as a bogey woman? When can we ignore her?
@ Matthew B.
But that is a great anagram, and I just about lost it when I heard Connie Willis’s delightful coincidental allusion.
Re the Heinlein bio, Puppies who hadn’t wasted their reading time / money and nominations on the slate works would have been free to seek out things more to their individual tastes and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the Heinlein bio would have picked up, oh, fifteen more votes or so (5% of the Puppy numbers.)
Aaron,
Me too, and (as Jim said) it was a near-run thing, but at the end of the day, enough people felt differently that it took home a rocket. However bad it may have been, it wasn’t bad enough for a majority of people to say “better to have no award at all than to give one to you.” Which leads me to believe that, in a hypothetical unrigged ballot in which English and/or Rinehart were nominated, the same would have happened to them. They’d have lost, but they wouldn’t have been No Awarded.
BTW, I disagree that “Ashes to Ashes” was tedious. I enjoyed it a great deal, and certainly thought it was more Hugo-worthy than Heuvelt’s story. But then again, I’m a sucker for stories about folklore and folk memory, and “Ashes to Ashes” pushed a lot of my buttons.
I see Hoyt has now gone full black is white, up is down. She’s declaring that “Sad Puppies 3: The 2015 Hugo Slate”, because slating is bad. And conversely people voting No Award must be a slate, because Marxists.
I have to wonder if the Olde Heuvelt would have won if there’d been even one other non-Puppy nominee.
If the Puppy slates were intended to lose, does that mean that being selected for inclusion on a Puppy slate means Mr Beale secretly thinks your work is shit?
Cat: I take it that ‘tenfold’ is an average? I would suppose that the boosting power of a slate is greater if the regular votes are more divided (so would be greater in short fiction than in Novel, for instance). There’s a possibility that if more voters are drawn in, they will nominate a greater variety of things; which is in principle a good thing, of course, but not helpful if the aim is to overwhelm slates.
@Nick Pheas
What stops you from ignoring her now? The only reason she came up was because of her rage at Laura J Mixon’s Hugo award, which she claims is a case of bullying and abuse of poor, innocent Benjanun who never did nobody no harm. As for forgiveness, unless you were one of her actual victims, what makes it your business (or mine) to forgive her? What is our moral standing for doing so? The community as a whole (with some exceptions) seems to consider her a manipulative, unpleasant and dishonest individual and keeps an eye on her for self-protective purposes. Until she shows signs of having genuinely changed, or just goes off to do something else with her life, I imagine that will remain the case. She’s still being published, so she hasn’t paid an excessive price for her behavior in terms of her career.
So…”Wait’ll next year!” is indeed their Xanatoasty battle cry of intimidation.
Ask any baseball fan how scary that one is.
@ Bruce:
I don’t use Safari myself, but this seems to show the how:
To add your own user style go to Preferences > Advanced > Style Sheet and select a CSS file (locally stored or on the network) to use that style sheet. (linked to page includes a screenshot; whoever commented about Safari before also said something about having to close and re-open Safari for it to take effect?)
The contents of that CSS file could be something similar to the following:
img[src*=”f471cb2b73b662a4ce3b7200cc03d5c4″] + span::after, /* aeou */
img[src*=”fad7ef8c84a0040340dfea31d68febbc”] + span::after, /* buwaya */
img[src*=”a7c666dc1899357bf1979391a0d524f3″] + span::after, /* James M. */
img[src*=”8471db4b6a6eae7d874f9fc4c640d90d”] + span::after, /* Tuomas Vainio */
img[src*=”a9bea8198715ed10882ecba7c7adaf37″] + span::after, /* Brian Z */
img[src*=”b4826f3f85672c6eb0fef5c6c681cfd5″] + span::after,
img[src*=”1809acffb3d75c834d1d3b7b2074ec8c”] + span::after {
content: “”;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
pointer-events: none;
background-color: white;
opacity: 0.7;
}
Replace the curly quotes on all the above lines (both the “img[src*=]” ones and the “content” one) with regular double quotes.
Change opacity and background-color to taste.
John O’Neill’s take on last night’s results:
“In short, the Puppies insisted that their team had been unfairly shut out of the game for too long, and gamed the system so that their superstars could finally take the field. And when they did, it became painfully obvious fairly quickly that this team simply couldn’t play ball.”
https://www.blackgate.com/2015/08/23/dear-puppies-your-taste-sucks/#comments
Sorry Nick. But there’s at least one person who’s life she is making utterly miserable, who really isn’t saying or doing anything toward her. She likes bullying people near as I can tell and people should stop enabling.
Ask any
baseballCubs fan how scary that one is.FTFY.
She’s still doing it. She is still blackmailing people and her cronies hate tweeted a friend of mine yesterday.
Thank you, Aan!
It isn’t a game. There are no “valid victory conditions”.
We can ignore that person when she has demonstrated for a very long time that she is no longer trying to destroy anyone’s life nor make any excuses for her own actions.
To do any less is to abandon her victims to social silencing and enforced smiley faces as if all were well.
You think this wouldn’t have happened again if they won? Trust me, you’d be hearing the crowing of victory, the claim that they’d proved their point (they’d claim that no matter what) and a vow to take the rest of the categories from the chastened and inferior chorfsmofsjws next year.
Winning doesn’t make wanna-be bullies back off and play nice.
I, too, am inclined to wonder where the nominees for “SP4” are going to come from – yes, the hard core of True Believers might be there (Beale, JCW, the Marmot, the mutual admiration society over at the Mad Geniuses Club)… but who else? It’s hard to imagine any middling-successful writer in the field looking at the current results and thinking “yes, a Sad Puppies nomination will definitely raise my profile as a writer and increase my chances of winning a major award!”
Even among the True Believers, surely reality must be seeping in around the edges? Are people really devoted enough to commit themselves, time after time, to an unwinnable struggle in support of Beale’s ego? How many times is even John C. Wright prepared to hear fandom say to him, in effect, “we would rather look at a sheet of blank paper than read your stories”?
@Kurt Busiek
Oh you can hear Puppies claiming victory if you look in the right places.They are also trying to claim that the sane majority destroyed the Hugos by rejecting their canine crapulosity, which, for the Puppettes means we lost, so they.. WON!!!
@Nick – she and her pals recently went after Pat Cadigan, shortly after her diagnosis, for the most bullshitty of bullshit reasons (bit off more than they could chew there, for what it’s worth.) I’ve seen on my own twitter feed the fallout from her going after other writers, including former victims she’s supposed to be leaving alone. All for reason that are utterly bullshit. You can ignore her, but it’s a bit of a privilege to be able to do so.
You’re asking that question less than 12 hours after a Hugo award was given to a detailed exposé of her horribleness. I find your timing pretty odd.
NickPheas:She’s apologised, and as far as I can tell confines herself to lashing back at people who’ve lashed out at her
This is incorrect. She continued to attack others, including her past victims, who were not attacking her but rather defending themselves or reaching out to others that she abused.
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Pat Cadigan, and Kari Sperring are only three examples among many.
Goodness, that does look trollish.
I don’t see the *books* sitting around onstage receiving the awards.
This ceremony is about celebrating the people who produced the works. Complaining about seeing the honoree instead of her winning work is meanspirited and goes against the celebratory nature of the ceremony.
@XS
I have not seen her attacking RLR or KS, though I might have missed them.
I have only seen her reacting to Pat Cardigan when PC referred a VERY prominent GamerGater to go read Mixon’s report. I think PC said that her intention was to point out the GamerGater that his interests were old hat, but I can totally see why someone who feels under siege could see that as an attack.
But she’s boring. It’s time to move on.
@rcade
Less than 12 hours after her utter defeat and humiliation. Yes. Hence my wondering what ‘enough’ would look like.
You call that an inventive taunt meriting an inventive insult?
Typical puppy attitude, demanding an undeserved reward just for showing up.
I
No kidding.
Do not — do NOT buy into RH and her supporter’s narrative of contrition and sweet good nature and innocent victimhood, or tiresomeness and wish it would go awayness and ignore her and she’ll go away.
RH has demonstrated herself as toxic, vindictive, vengeful, and self-pitying. Her pattern seems to be that if pressured she will apologize, then go on the attack against whoever looks vulnerable and isolated to her.
Until she demonstrates the exact opposite, some humility and generosity of spirit and goodwill and genuine effort at better behavior, not just covering up and smothering over reports of her attacks, and does so for a very long time which she does not get to define, she should not get free quiet space to practice her hateful sadism.
I’d say the best way of describing him is a ‘clerical fascist’.
I liked this piece on Beale by Adam Roberts.
Yes, you did miss them. It was discussed here some time ago. She turned KS making a throaway remark about Fail Fandom Anon writing mocking fiction about her and VD into KS making a rape joke about her. This resulted in a misguided individual trying to get KS retrospectively ejected from Eastercon.
Nickpheas
I may have missed it but as far as I’m aware she has not apologised to all those she set out to destroy; there have been repeated attempts to claim that some of the most stomach turning stuff wasn’t from her, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary.
She spent six months harassing someone who had been raped for daring to write about her recovery process on the grounds that it diminished the importance of rape. She hasn’t apologised for that. She has never apologised for her death and rape threats.
It’s very difficult to phrase this right, in the spirit of File 770, but I do feel that I can do without guys telling me how I should respond to another woman’s behaviour; there are such a lot of them doing that already. I have to say that there were quite a few guys who managed to convince themselves that RH was just criticising books, and that since they were manly men they could shrug it off and women should do the same.
They were less verbose on the subject of how to respond to rape and death threats, apart from the ones who said we should shrug those off too; I didn’t find that very helpful, which is probably why I don’t find your observations helpful either…
@Nigel
I’d have thought that clerical fascist fitted John C Wright better than Beale, unless self-worship is a sort of clericalism.
@SocialInjusticeWarrior – maybe Wright’s more of a fascistical cleric?
JJ ays the marmot is a Spokane mascot. Which means I should stop trying to convince people that Connie Willis’ “rabid marmot” joke last night was a File 770 shoutout. Well rats!
And now Wired has a report on the 2015 Hugos with a link to the Mixon Report.
That’s why it needed to win, so that more people will read the report and can be on their guard. If not for BS, for similar behaviour in others.
It’s 12 years since Winterfox spent a week spitting at me over the internet. And I’m not really a target, I just said that I thought the language used in a review didn’t match the flaws she described in the work. It’s nasty because it’s so unrelenting that you begin to feel there must be some truth in the accusations, perhaps you are a piece of filth and never realised it. If I’d wanted or needed to continue participating in that community it would have been much worse. It was supposed to be fun so I stopped taking part.
Now multiply that by the years and realise that for some it was their hope ofa successful career they were driven away from.
Oops, looks like it still upsets me.
@Laura Resnick: WSFS is today debating formal proposals for closing the loophole the Puppies exploited, and thus mitigating the effects of slates and block-voting in the nominations process from 2017 onward.
Fun dayn moyl in gots oyern. (From your mouth to God’s ears.)
@Peace: Jay Lake! Awwwwww …
Seeing his sister on-stage in a Jay-grade-loud aloha shirt, and with Bronwyn next to her, to accept the tribute, was a wistful moment. I’d rather not keep attending Hugo ceremonies where multiple personal friends (in this case, Jay Lake and Eric P. Scott) are being commemorated. Please?
In happier news, Orphan Black! Yay! We need another clone dance.
@Nigel
I’d have said Chaotic Evil level one assassin with a belief that he’s really a Lawful Good level sixteen half-elf ranger….
But, as Brian Z always says, we need to negotiate!
But she’s boring. It’s time to move on.
You have the privilege of doing so.
Those who she is attacking and those who see the effects of her and her enablers’ attacks on others where they live don’t have that luxury.
@ Andrew M.
Slates boost nominations 10-fold is my estimate based on the way the nomination suggestions thread on Brad T.’s blog worked. Some 40 people suggested some 35 works (among what I thought were books; I didn’t track this among other categories and would welcome further analysis). The most popular books in this suggestion thread got three “nominations” each, or less than 10% of the total. I assumed that the Sads =would nominate 100% of what was on the slate, for a roughly 10-fold boost in nominating power for that group.
I felt this rough estimate was borne out by the Chaos Horizon estimate of Puppy numbers at roughly 350 (out of 2,000 nominating ballots) meaning that Puppies were about 15% of the nominators but locked out whole categories (a real favorite in the best novel category gets about 25%, so the Pups, who could “single handedly” give a work 15% didn’t dominate that one but only filled in around the most favorite–but in other categories where real favorites mean 13% or 10%, Pups, with 15% the numbers but 100% nomination rates, owned the field.)
I am not a statistician and would welcome a more informed analysis from a neutral source.
@Doire
*hugs*
You didn’t deserve that grief. None of you did.
Doire, I’m sorry that happened to you. To anyone, really, but…well, I’m sorry.
I really hope that some people were able to read the Mixon report and go “oh–it wasn’t just me, then,” and get a little relief from the feeling that they must have been terrible people.
The tone of her latest tweets suggests that she’s the same venom distribution device that she was in her decade as winterfox, a cracked mirror, valse de lune, pyrofennec requireshate etc etc etc etc.
This is my impression, too. Anytime I’ve ever read any of her statements or comments, I’m very puzzled about why anyone defends her.