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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And as she spends virtually all the intervening time lambasting and insulting Mixon, playing the victim, and framing the whole thing as racist attacks of white people on an author who is not white?
I’ll go with “not yet”. She is every bit the tumour on the community that Day is. I don’t like them, don’t want to read them, but want to know what they are up to because they are both motivated by joy in destruction.
WIRED has posted an excellent article about the Puppy controversy, including interviews with a number of key figures, and an account of last night’s Hugo Loser’s Party.
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/
I’m not sure it’s correct to say that slates boost voting power as much as ten-fold. I ran some simulations over the weekend, and it seems that if non-slate folk vote their conscience for a full 5, in most cases the slates only get 2 nominees. This is assuming the slates are 20% of the electorate, they’re pushing unpopular candidates, and that I have the correct “normal” curve (I used the 2012 short story nomination data as a basis). And, of course, that I didn’t botch anything in my simulation.
Sad to hear that Liu’s novel might not be up to snuff. I’ll download a preview and see if its my cup of tea, but expectations are lowered appropriately.
Re: BS
I will need to see a good few years of her refraining from siccing her friends and followers on people before she’ll be welcome. In the mean time, I intend to keep track of who she’s going after so that support can be offered instead of forcing them to deal with it alone. She managed enough damage in the decade plus she was able to operate unchallenged without allowing it to continue.
@Doire
I’m sorry you had to deal with that. No-one should have to.
@Mike Glyer
I plan on thinking its a reference in the privacy of my own head until directly contradicted by Connie Willis. I’m too attached to the idea to drop it that easily. 🙂
Let’s put this as a hypothetical for legal reasons, shall we? Let’s say that she might still be blackmailing people with things they told her when she was love bombing them and they would like to get away from her but can’t.
OGH said: Rats!
{obliviously pedantic}Actually, we’re talking genus Marmota (basically, large squirrels, not Rattus.{/obliviously pedantic}
It ain’t happening yet. She is still going at it, and while she is less effective, it doesn’t mean she is not doing damage. She is. The damage is less because she has been exposed, not thanks to any lessening of efforts on her part.
Anna–I accept this as a possibility but some of her supporters and followers are so fierce and voluminous that I would find it hard to believe that they are reluctant. I’m going mainly on what I have seen in passing on Twitter.
Chthuluhim, it’s not the voting power that’s magnified by slates; it’s the nominating power. When you have a thousand people choosing from hundreds of good books to nominate the works they love, the odds that they’ll all… or most… love, or even have heard of, the same things is small. They’ll be some overlap, but not as much as you might think. So a small group of maybe 100 votes all nominating the same thing can overwhelm those thousand nominators.
If there were only a dozen or so really good stories to choose your nomination candidates from, it wouldn’t be a problem. But since the field’s gotten so big, that’s what happens.
Hope this clarifies.
Now, for VOTING, everyone’s looking at the same five candidates. So the slate power is much reduced.
Oh yeah, most of them are in earnest. I find it helpful to think that at least one is under duress. Sort of like the one blank round in the execution squad, you know?
Brian Z on August 23, 2015 at 1:20 am said:
Question: does anyone know if the coming in below No Award thing is being discussed on Butcher fan sites?
So is that “the secret plan” and is “what is really going on”.
Fool the fans of best selling authors that their author has been insulted by the Hugo’s, so come along and give those SJWs a kicking and get your author a Hugo?
Buh-wha?
Plonking trolls in Safari: http://jamoche.dreamwidth.org/10115.html
Has the advantage over the Prefs > Advanced style sheet that you can choose which sites to apply it to and reload it any time.
Did the photo of all the Hugo winners on stage happen after the ceremony last night? The livestream ended with people yelling that it had been forgotten.
When I used the word “voting” it was a misnomer. I ran my simulation on the nomination process. Looking at the nominating patterns, I think there’s a pretty clear power curve or logarithmic distribution, where a few things get the most votes, a few more get fewer votes, and then it tails off. So it’s not quite that spread out.
I think slates appeared to get a ten-fold boost this year because most people don’t fill out all their nominations, and the slates did. If everyone did, that could improve the chances that the more popular items will push themselves above the base slate level, like it did with Ancillary Sword. That said, I agree the effect of full nominations could be to flatten out the power curve. That’s where my knowledge falls down.
All of that said, EPH seems to be the best long-term solution to the slate problem. I was just trying to predict what might happen next year.
Cmm, Anna
Yep: there are people who really long to see themselves as crusaders for justice, but can’t be bothered to do anything. They can therefore lie on the couch all day sending nasty tweets to the latest designated victim, secure in the belief that they are challenging injustice wherever it may be.
They tend not to acknowledge the fact that they get a rush from tormenting people; they rarely have that degree of self-awareness. RH herself seems to be becoming more vitriolic as the days go by, which is why I am not prepared to allow her to be edited out of the narrative, even for people whose attention span makes 12 hours seem like eternity…
@Peace: I swear, I get the impression the word “fuggheads,” an old, old, old fannish term is being used as a dog whistle and secret password.
The etymology given on Fancyclopedia would tend to support that it’s an old fannish term, from 1959.
I was active in con fandom on the west coast during the 1970s, and apa fandom, and it’s been interesting (when I came back into fandom via online media fandom in 2003) to see what fannish terminology has disappeared and what new terms have been coined. I tended to twitch a bit at “sci-fi” being used as a neutral or positive term, but got over it. I tend not to see (in the online fandom where I hung out, which had a lot of age range, but age does not always correlate to time spend in fandom) GAFIATE though I always found it a useful term (since I did it a couple of times). I’ve been glad to see (in the circles I hang around in) that “mundane” as a slur doesn’t seem to be used much or at all.
Goodness knows, I tend to still use “cool” which dates me–but there’s a reason for new terms for new times, and the use of insults from an earlier period is going to perhaps be negative. (At one point during Racefail, the use of “orcs” and in one notorious case “nithings” to insult the “Social Justice Warriors” seemed to be serving the same function–along with wounded protestations that heavens no, neither of those terms could possibly be racist.)
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
I know. Its a shame, for her; if she’d been genuinely remorseful and had changed her ways the way she tried to claim she’d done with her new persona, much of fandom would eventually have let her off the hook. Fandom is very forgiving even when it shouldn’t be. Instead, she’s doubled down and proven she’s rotten all the way through. I almost pity her. It can’t be very nice living in her head.
Even more of a shame for the people she continues to attack and sic people on and blackmail and manipulate. At least enough of fandom is aware that she’s a bad apple and can support and protect those she goes after accordingly.
That’s the thing though- Puppies consider quality of writing to be irrelevant. From listening to them, I’ve honestly concluded that puppies are baffled at even the notion of quality. At best you will hear them mutter that quality is subjective; more usually, they will try to dodge the question by pointing at some other work that won. The only thing that matters to them is that the work is written by the right person, and that it has the right ideas.
I could say that this is partially going back to the notion of SF as a literature of ideas, but I think it’s as much ideology and cronyism.
Nigel:
I don’t know if my grandmother (born in 1900) was born in the town of Tipperary itself or not, but she basically grew up in this convent when it was a convent — her mother died of twins when my grandmother was about 3, I guess. Her father was better-off than many (he was a horse trader and agent), but not enough to raise 6 daughters by himself.
As Irish convent schools go it wasn’t near the worst, but she was still really bitter about it 60 years later. And then there were The Troubles, and she was kind of working with the radical terrorist-types, so it’s lucky she was a woman, because she felt useless and frustrated and went to America — if she’d been a man she would probably have stayed and gotten herself killed.
@Laura: Thank you so much for posting the WIRED link. (*saves for future use*)
And *sniffles* at the account of GRRM’s Alfies….
re: Benjanun Sriduangkaew:
That is from July.
I wish abusers could simply be ignored. Doing so, however, also ignores their targets.
I still legit have no idea wtf I’m supposed to have done to my ‘victims’.
She should read the Mixon report.
@Shao Ping
Considering how much she whinges about the Mixon Report, you’d think she’d have read it, and yet that tweet implies otherwise.
Or she was drumming up sympathy.
I think she is just abusive. From my experience, abusers rarely think they are abusive and quick to turn on anyone who says they are. This is from an hour ago:
Yep, I think you hit the nail on the head here. RH/BS doesn’t consider any of her behavior wrong; she feels justified in having done it all because her victims “deserved it.” She’s only apologizing because people have told her it could harm her career if she doesn’t. That’s the logic of an abuser all right.
And now she’s focusing on detail errors Mixon might have made while utterly ignoring and refusing to address the totality of the picture shown by Mixon’s report.
I’ve seen this behavior before up close with abusive people. This is not a person who intends to accept responsibility for bad behavior and change her ways. This is a person deep in Defensive Mode who is looking for other people to blame for her own viciousness.
@Shao Ping
So she’s threatening to stalk Mixon’s online presence and comb through it to find everything and anything that (taken out of context?) might make Mixon look bad, and she thinks this will somehow make her look good? Gosh.
@Aaron: “I believe that Brian Thomas Schmidt also walked out of the ceremony – apparently right after it was announced that No Award won the category he was nominated in.”
Color me completely unsurprised. I was talking to him on Twitter a couple of years back or so (anyone remember the “rotting meat” dustup?), and he was civil right up to the point when I revealed that I didn’t care for his use of that phrase to describe people I like. As soon as he saw that… the difference was night and day. Suddenly he was describing me as some crazed psychopath who’d changed on a dime, and he blocked me AND deleted his half of our public conversation after sending a few choice insults my way. Of course, he couldn’t erase his direct messages, so I still have those…
Yeah, I was totally not surprised to see him picked for a Puppy slate this year, and the report that he left the ceremony after losing meshes seamlessly with my experience of his character.
@Kurt Busiek: “Ask any baseball fan how scary that one is.”
As the great Father Guido Sarducci once said, “I’ma shakin’ inna my boots.” 😉
EPH has passed. The arc of the universe is long, but it tends towards telling Ted Beale to shut the hell up.
Good grief, no kidding. What a landslide! Wow.
In a totally different direction, it looks like “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” barely squeaked in past “No Award”. Interesting.
It has? Woohoo!
You know Aaron, we’ve given “righthink” a lot of slack over the past fifty years or so.
It’s been more like 70 years since 1945, James.
@John Seavey: Gah, I’ve been refreshing this thread and forgot about the WSFS liveblog one – thanks for posting this here. WOO-HOO! 😀 We can’t rest on our laurels – it has to pass again next year – but (checking) 186 for versus 62 against is a very, very comfortable margin. WHEW!!!
I mean really, EPH is a good idea regardless of slates. It’s a logical way of handling nominating to ensure better representation, period. IMHO.
@Peace: IMHO, “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” did as well as it did (barely beating out No Award) because (a) it wasn’t a slate AND (b) a lot of folks prefer to rank all candidates and/or at least have something win. I sympathize but disagree with folks who follow (b). And in a more honest nominating year, it would’ve lost, methinks.
So. The Puppies’ actions to game the rules to gobble up awards (from people they despise and refuse to associate with at that) turned out to have robbed the tragically deceased Eugie Foster of her last chance for a Hugo Award.
What a farce of hubris and ate.
Kendall said:
As far as I’m concerned, Brad should be cheering this result. After all, his whole stated rationale for SP3 was to expose flaws in the voting system that everyone knew was there, but nobody was correcting, right? So a change to the rules to prevent SP5 should be exactly the result he was looking for, and he should greet today overjoyed in knowing that his white-hat hacking showed everyone the vulnerabilities so that they could be fixed.
…buuuuuut I doubt it.
Fantastic news about EPH!
For the novelette, I put No Award first and “Day the World Turned Upside Down” right after it, and no other stories on my ballot, because I didn’t really think it was much of a story, but since it wasn’t a Puppy slate pick I didn’t want to leave it off entirely. This was different than my vote for Julie Dillon, whose work I was quite comfortable voting for because I thought it was Hugo-worthy regardless of the fact that she faced only Puppy competition.
In other words, I didn’t think “Day the World Turned” would have gotten a vote from me if the Puppies hadn’t pushed better stuff off. Dillon could very well have done, though of course I can’t be positive since I didn’t know at that point who she would have run against on a legitimate ballot. I should go check out who the opposition would have been, but in any case I thought Dillon’s stuff was beautiful so I had zero qualms about voting her in.
(I would suggest we could call this whole mess “The World The Day Turned Upside Down” but that gives way too much credit and power to Poxy.)
@Peace
Well frell me dead… Really did think we’d see at least one more round of this before the cats could be herded.
Sufficient numbers of frenzied canines can be very motivating for cats.
Relevant gif I hope will come through:
Cat and Puppies
Me too!
What a damnable mess the Puppies have made of things.
Doctor Science – Nowadays when you hear of someone being educated in an Irish religious institution in any part of the 20th century, the stomach sinks. I’m glad it wasn’t too bad. God knows I tend to cheer people escaping 1920s Ireland and don’t begrudge them never coming back. Good for her, and I hope she had a good life.
HOWEVER that is a legitimately beautiful place. The Vee is breathtaking, and you can stand on a high hill in the Comeraghs or the Knockmealldowns with the sun on your face and the wind in your hair and let it all flow away. Sigh. It’s been too long.
One side of my family were horse people, too, and wealthy with it, but my great-grandparents eloped to New York and that was it for the inheritance. They came back, though, in a very bad mood.
I think the blockbuster win for Helsinki was part and parcel of the No Award response to the slates: this is Worldcon, and Worldcon isn’t the property of the U.S.
Trying to turn it into a pawn in the U.S. internal culture wars no doubt looked good to puppidum, some of whom appear not to grasp that there are places outside the U.S., but in the end it failed for the very obvious reason: it’s Worldcon, not US con.
Incidentally, RH’s latest threats remind me of Glendower’s claim that he can call spirits from the vasty deeps; I’m pretty sure that Laura knows that calling them doesn’t imply that they will answer.
Also, really cool gif, though are you sure that no dogs were injured whilst filming it?..
4/6 has passed as well. Apparently there was some debate about whether those were the right numbers to go with, but they decided not to change them and it has passed. At this rate, I’m kind of tempted to go to KC next year. 🙂
I wanted to love Grace of Kings, because everything he’s said about the story and the worldbuilding in interviews is fantastic, but I bounced off the first chapter three times. I think the prose style is just not for me.
That said, I have no doubt it will be a Hugo nominee for this year. There is a lot of buzz about the book.
Oh wow, I didn’t expect that. So will they be used concurrently? That’s fascinating. Can anyone point to any analysis on how that will work if they’re both ratified and both go into effect?
I have to say the prospect of attending KC is looking pretty tempting to me too. (Eyes bank account speculatively….)
@May Tree
That cat looks seriously freaked out.
@Stevie: I feel that’s a nice theory, but unsupported by facts — absent proof (a) most supporting are non-U.S. (unlikely) and (b) most voted against them for that reason (unknowable). The response to slates seems to clearly be a response to slates. A Croatian slate likely would’ve gotten a similar response (to pick a country “at random” ‘cuz it might be part of a trip next year), IMHO.
Re. Helsinki winning: I’m not just happy they won (I put it 2nd, but was really on the fence), but I’m especially happy my other half mentioned saving up to go! 😀 We like to travel, but it’s unlikely we’d go to Finland without an excuse like Worldcon. Now I have two years to learn how to say, “Can you recommend a good local wine” in Finnish (one of the few phrases I remember from a trip to Italy in my 20s). 😉 Along with please, thank you, “where’s the restroom,” and “do you have any batteries” (which I had to learn in Switzerland when I needed batteries 😉 ).
Having just caught up in this thread, I’m about to start in on the Sunday Meeting thread… with a big smile on my face and a song in my heart, because I already know the two results I was most interested in. 😀
For the curious, the song’s name is “The Day the Puppies Cried,” and there is a chance that lyrics may be forthcoming. 🙂
4/6 JUST squeaks through with 86 yes to 82 no.