The Dogs My Destination 5/18

aka Recent studies have shown that approximately 40% of authors are sad puppies. The rest of us just drink.

Today’s roundup delivers alisfranklin, John C. Wright, Alexandra Erin, Kevin J. Maroney, Betsy Wollheim, Dave Freer, Lela E. Buis, David French, thezman, Eric Flint, Joe Sherry, Scott Seldon, Lis Carey, Lisa J. Goldstein, Larry Correia, Jeff Duntemann, and Declan Finn. (Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editors of the day Tuomas Vainio and Laura Resnick.)

alisfranklin on Unassigned Readings

“As for gaming the Hugo Awards it is surprisingly…” – May 18

You want to talk about slates of nominees and culture wars and take-overs? Fine, let’s talk about that. Because you know what I want to see for the 2016 Hugo awards?

I want to see Welcome to Night Vale up for awards in Best Novel and Best Dramatic Presentation. I want to see Stephen Universe and Agent Carter and whatever anime is big right now. I want to see Homestuck. I want to see something from the OTW and I want at least one videogame up for Long Form and one DLC/expansion up in Short Form. I want to see fanfic writers and fanartists up for their categories. I want to see someone get nominated purely on force of their Tumblr.

Whether or not I like the individual nominations doesn’t matter. I just want to see them, because seeing them will tell me the Hugos are relevant again. That they mean something to kids who were born after the invention of the personal computer, let alone born this century. You want to talk about logrolling an awards ceremony? Tumblr fandom is orders of magnitude bigger than the voting pool for the current Hugos. If y’all want those awards, they’re yours. No old greybeard muttering about “true fans” and “golden age SFF” can take that away from you. Literally not; by numbers alone there just aren’t enough of them.

 

John C. Wright

“WSJ on SJW” – May 18

A lamebrain and lazy Wall Street Journal article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-culture-wars-invade-science-fiction-1431707195

For any reader without the patience (or the nose-clothespin)  to wade through this, the summary is: “We asked two white guys with lots of awards and they said the system was fine and the Sad Puppies are pulp-writing carpetbagging  racists.”

First, the issue is not about literary fiction versus pulp adventure fiction. The Social Justice Warriors do not write literary fiction, they write boring lectures and finger-wagging trash. They are members of a clique who have controlled the awards for about a decade.

They excuse the poor craftsmanship of their meandering tales by claiming them to be written to erudite and aethereal literary standards beyond the grasp of the hoi polloi. (Or they would say, if they were literary enough to use phrases like the hoi polloi  (a Greek remark!), or drop Gilbert and Sullivan  allusions casually into their sentences.)

For the record, I write literary fiction, and Larry Correia writes pulp, and he and I are on the same team.

 

Alexandra Erin on Blue Author Is About To Write

“Situation Normal: All Fisked Up” – May 18

So Brad Torgersen, leader of the Sad Puppy campaign for this year, has a post up on his blog called “Fisking The Broken Narrative”. Fisking, for the uninitiated, is an art from in which one takes a written work, quotes the whole or majority of it in-line, broken up with zingers a la Mystery Science Theater. At least, that’s my understanding of the typical fisking. The Sad Puppies seem more inclined to just rant and rave in the interstices, and Torgersen in particular spends more time reacting to what it would have been convenient for his narrative for the source editorial to have said than he does responding to the actual text…..

Mr. Maroney, the individual whom Torgersen was attempting to fisk, did in his source attempt to gently clue the Puppies in to the inadvisability of labeling their opponents “reactionary” while holding a stated goal of “stop people from trying to change things and bring it back to the way it used to be”, but all Torgersen appeared to take away from it was “STOP SAYING MEAN THINGS”. We could speculate about whether this was due to an inability to comprehend the point or a tactical decision to only respond in ways that further the Puppy’s narrative, but I don’t see the percentage in it.

 

Kevin J. Maroney in New York Review of SF

“The Puppies of Terror” – May 17

The Sad Puppies are a group of writers and other fans dissatisfied with what they saw as a trend in the Hugo process toward overrepresentation of “liberal” works at the expense of traditional, meat-and-potatoes science fiction and fantasy. So in 2014 they gamed the Hugo nomination system to place nominees in several Hugo Award categories. What the Puppies did was very simple: They encouraged people to buy Worldcon supporting memberships and vote for the Puppy slate of nominees, and they got one or two nominees into several categories. These “Sad Puppy 2” nominees failed to land any trophies; in fact, with the exception of Toni Weisskopf in the Best Editor, Long Form, the SP2 finalists came in last in every category. And, like any well-intentioned, thoughtful group of principled actors, the Sad Puppies responded by encouraging the attention of a group of woman-hating terrorists.

 

Kevin J. Maroney in New York Review of SF

“The Puppy Fight” – May 18

The entire Puppy movement, rhetorically, is based on the idea that the science fiction enterprise has changed tremendously and not for the better, since the fabled Golden Age when all of the Puppies were young. The head Sad Puppy himself, Brad Torgersen, has taken to referring to his enemies as CHORFS, “Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary, Fanatics.” So, yes, the person who is bravely positioning himself as the force that will stop the people who want to change things believes that his opponents are “reactionaries.” This is, apparently, someone whose understanding of words is limited to “what sounds like an insult?”

 

Lela E. Buis

“Is there too much diversity in SF&F?” – May 18

So, is there really too much diversity on the ballot? This might not be a popular observation, but I can personally see a clear political agenda, at least in the US and Northern Europe, to increase acceptance of diversity. Everyone must have noticed this. Diversity is billed as a good thing, something we should respect that can bring in new ideas and new ways of doing things. It also implies acceptance of differences like gender, LGBTQ status, religion, disability, race, national origin, etc., etc., etc. But, the truth is that diversity makes us all nervous. Political scientist Robert Putnam, researching community trends in 2000, made the inconvenient discovery that greater diversity in a community leads to less trust, less volunteering, less cooperation, less voting and less civic engagement in general for average members of the community. As a liberal, Putnam was so disturbed by this finding that he waited until 2007 to publish the results, i.e. that diversity damages communities.

 

Betsy Wollheim on Facebook – May 16

I’ve been silent about the whole disgusting Hugo mess, but frankly I’m shocked by some of the mainstream coverage it’s been getting. For the record, many people on the “puppy ballot” were never asked permission, like my business partner, Sheila Gilbert, who has no affiliation with any puppies, but will not withdraw because (in my opinion and that of her authors) she damn well deserves a Hugo after 45 years dedicated to editing Science Fiction and Fantasy. Personally I think the puppies are fucked. There has always been a “Wellsian and Vernian” split in the field, but this takeover of the award is just abominable! Not only New Republic has spoken out against them, but now, the Wall Street Journal.

 

Betsy Wollheim on Facebook – May 16

I am personally grateful to George R. R. Martin for bravely supporting the rational and historical side of the Hugo brouhaha. As someone who has been attending conventions since age six (1958) I can say there have always been political divisions in our field, but prior to the internet neither political side has had the power (nor inclination!) to game the field’s most prestigious award. If you look at the novels that have won the Hugos over the decades. You will see that as many are great adventure yarns as books with political messages. It’s really pretty even. But this current fiasco is just plain disgusting. Also, as an editor, it makes me angry to see a writer as important as GRRM having to spend his valuable time informing ignorant people about the history of worldcon and the history of the Hugos.

 

Dave Freer at Mad Genius Club

“Who we write (and publish) For.” – May 18

It’s been very revealing during the various bursts of rage at the Sad Puppies by traditionally published authors and their publishers. We’re getting to see that dislike, that disdain, that ‘second (or possibly far lower) class citizen, should not be allowed to vote, aren’t ‘Real Fans’, should be put in a dog-pound (we’re not human, and there is no need to treat us as such, apparently. Now I do understand that as far as this monkey is concerned, but most of the pups, their supporters and friends are as human as their detractors.) You get editors like Betsy Wolheim at DAW telling us filthy hoi polloi “as an editor, it makes me angry to see a writer as important as GRRM having to spend his valuable time informing ignorant people about the history of worldcon and the history of the Hugos.” Thanks Betsy. A good spin attempt to blame us for GRRM’s decisions. He’s adult, he can decide what he wants to do. We pig-ignorant revolting peasants can’t actually MAKE him do anything. He wasn’t going to write any more if Bush was re-elected IIRC. The tide of BS from this has overflowed my gum boots.

 

David French at National Review

“Sci-Fi’s Sad Puppies” – May 18

A literary revolt against political correctness It turns out that pop culture doesn’t inexorably drift toward political correctness. The forces of “social justice” are not invincible, and conservative artists do have cultural power. Just ask the very angry, very frustrated members of the science-fiction Left.Conservatives are by now familiar with the depressing pop-culture script. Angry at perceived injustice or exclusion and eager to spread their particular brand of “social justice,” the Left targets for transformation an artistic medium that was previously not overtly or intentionally politicized. Within a few short years, the quality of art — or its popularity — becomes far less relevant than either its message or the identity of the artist. As part of this process, prestigious awards are no longer a means of rewarding the best work but rather a means of rewarding the best work from the list of acceptable choices. [The remainder of the article is behind a paywall, cost 25 cents.]

 

thezman

“Sad, Rabid Puppies on the Front Lash” – May 18

The only area of fiction with a male audience is sci-fi/fantasy. So-called serious fiction was taken over lunatics and feminists to the point where it has no audience outside of the academy. The fiction that sells best is the rape fantasy stuff popular with middle-aged white women. Otherwise, fiction for men is mostly aimed at harmless weirdos who prefer to be the female character in on-line games.

That’s why the lunatics are making war on sci-fi and fantasy fiction. They sense this group of white males are weak and can be bullied. After all, a guy who gets beat up for wearing his Frodo costume to school is not going to push back against the heavy weights of the genre. At least that’s the assumption. It’s why the cult has made a fetish of bullying, by the way. They want it as their exclusive tool for socializing children.

 

Eric Flint

“WHAT THE HELL, LET’S DO IT AGAIN – STILL MORE ON THE HUGO AWARDS” – May 18

James May, who keeps posting here, is the gift that never stops giving. In one of his most recent posts, he insists once again that the SJW (social justice warrior) hordes are a menace to science fiction. So, in this essay, I will go through his points one at a time to show how ridiculous they are whether examined in part or (especially) as a whole…..

In one of my former lives I was a TA in the history department at UCLA. In that capacity, I read and graded a lot of essays written by students in which they attempted, with greater or lesser success, to advance an historical proposition.

So far, James May’s essay advancing the proposition that science fiction as a genre—or at least its most prestigious awards—have been overwhelmed by a radical lesbian-centric racialized feminist crusade is getting an F. He’s made no attempt to substantiate a single one of his claims. Literally, not one.

 

Charmingly Euphemistic

“Received my Hugo voters’ reading packet today” – May 18

Slates are extremely powerful.  In normal voting everyone reads different stuff and has different tastes, so no one work will receive more than maybe 10% of the nominating votes.  But slate voters agree to vote on the same five nominees for each category. This means a slate needs to come up with about 10% of the nominating votes to sweep every category. The 90% of individual voters are swamped and overwhelmed by the 10% of slate voters.  Lest you think I am exaggerating, over two thirds of the slots on this year’s Hugo ballot are on the Sad Puppy Slate or the Rabid Puppy Slate, or both.

I am really afraid that if these slates see any success at all, it will be slates all the way down from now on. Therefore, in order to whatever I can to discourage slates in future years, I plan to  only vote for non-slate works above “no award.”

While the extreme sexist and racist attitudes of some of the slate organizers sickens me, it is the damage to the Hugo awards that will be done by slates that motivated me to get involved this year.  I don’t want slates of progressive writers either.

 

Joe Sherry on Adventures in Reading

“Hugo Nominee / Voter’s Packet Available” – May 18

You can find Zombie Nation online, but there’s no way to tell what is included in the nominated collection. I’ve been boldly reading the comic from the start, powering through, but I’m only up to 2013 strips, so it’s taking a while. But, you can look at any 2014 work from Zombie Nation and use that to evaluate Carter Reid for Fan Artist if you don’t want to wait for Zombie Nation to hit the voter’s packet (or attempt to read five years of strips).

 

Scott Seldon on Seldon’s SF Blog

“Ann Leckie – What A Hugo Award Winner Should Look Like” – May 18

I quickly followed reading Ancillary Justice with the sequel, Ancillary Sword. It was as good and as engrossing, bringing with it new aspects of the universe and the characters. If a sequel ever deserved as many awards as the original, this one certainly does. It is a magnificent world given to us by a magnificent writer. I can’t way for the third book. I definitely have a new author to add to my list of favorites. I can’t wait to see what she does next. Her nomination for this year’s Hugo Awards is justly deserved.

 

Lis Carey on Lis Carey’s Library

“One Bright Star to Guide Them, by John C. Wright” – May 18

This wants so badly to be an allegorical fable in the manner of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. And it fails so, so badly.

 

Lisa J. Goldstein on theinferior4

“The Hugo Ballot, Part 11: Novellas” – May 18

I love the idea behind “The Plural of Helen of Troy,” by John C. Wright.  There’s a City Beyond Time, Metachronopolis, with shining towers and bridges and gardens.  Fog caused by too many time changes shrouds the lower towers, and in the upper stories live the Masters, who control the forces of time. Unfortunately there’s something of a fog on the story as well.

 

Larry Correia on Monster Hunter Nation

“Sad Puppies 3: The Ensaddening” – January 26

It is that time of year again. If you’d like to nominate good books, stories, and related works for the Hugos so that the biggest award in sci-fi/fantasy isn’t just a Social Justice Warrior circle jerk, you need to get yourself a supporting membership to Sasquan before the end of January.

color-sp-1 LARGE

Declan Finn on A Pius Man

“Sad Puppies Bite Back, V: a Puppy Wins the Hugo” – May 18

[DF adjusts speakers.  SWAT team Irish step dances down the street, never to be seen again.  DF sighs, moves to mailbox, muttering] I wonder if John C. Wright will loan me some of his Vatican Ninjas. It’s not like he gets SWATted like this. He’s a living brain in a jar, what are they going to slap the handcuffs on?

 

 

506 thoughts on “The Dogs My Destination 5/18

  1. Aaron,

    the statement is one that has been a stand in for “the Hugos ought to be a popular vote” or “how dare those elitists tell us what the best is” and arguments similarly arranged. THat’s how I perceived it this time as well.

  2. Of course the Hugo voters cannot choose the very “best” SF/F out there. I doubt any system anywhere could choose one work, of all the works published in a year, that every SF/F fan would nod their heads and say “Yes that is the very best”. (That’s one reason there are small numbers of WSFS members who would like to see “Outstanding Acheivement in Science Fiction or Fantasy” instead of “Best” but that is a derailing nit pick.)

    There will *never* be one work every SF/F reader will agree is the *best* work of the year.

    There won’t even ever be one work every member of WSFS will point to as the “best” in a year.

    But we are supposed to strive to pick the best. It isn’t going to be “the” best by every metric, but it darned well ought to be the work each individual voter thinks is, if not the best she’s read in a year, then at least it’s an Outstandnig Acheivement. If there are no works that rate Outstanding Acievement in your opinion, then voting No Award is a perfectly rational choice.

    The works this year are, in many instances, not Outstanding Achievements.

  3. JJ said: “Yes, I’d agree that for many of the Puppies, it just comes down to them dismissing and disregarding anything which does not match their worldview.

    But with Torgersen? He’s perfectly aware that the “justifications” for the Puppy campaigns are a complete fabrication: he helped fabricate them. He just blocked Ebbs on Facebook because he couldn’t risk letting his sheep see any evidence inconsistent with the fabrications.”

    I dunno–to me, the Juliette Wade thread on here was a perfect example of cognitive dissonance in action. Brad recontextualized Juliette’s fairly unambiguous statements into something that fit his worldview–she couldn’t really mean that the Puppies were wrong and she wanted no part of it, it had to be that she was afraid of counter-Puppy action! Then she came back and spelled it out for him, and you can see in his subsequent posts that he’s mentally floundering. He can’t recontextualize her words, he can’t rewrite the narrative, he can’t ignore it…until someone came along and said the problem was that he was too nice and she was just a meanie like the rest. And you can almost see, in real time, the way he grasps at the idea like a lifeline and rewrites the entire incident in his head into just another case of the mean SJWs being mean to him, the nicest man in fandom. To me, that screamed cognitive dissonance.

    Although here we should probably take Alexandra Erin’s line to heart that there’s no profit in trying to figure out whether Torgesen is lying to others or to himself. 🙂

  4. “Andrew, are you blaming fandom for being taken by surprise by the Puppies’ actions.”

    Surprise? Pearl Harbor was a surprise. Washington attacking Trenton was a surprise. The start of the Six Day War was a surprise. The SP3 effort was not.
    It’s not like SP3 came out of left field, anyone involved in last years Hugo’s was well aware of what was going on. If they weren’t, well I’m not sure that’s a result of hopeless optimism or willful ignorance. I tend towards the former, but what can I say, I’m not as old and jaded as I appear to be.

    The larger issue, for me anyways, is that the worlds most prestigious SF/F awards can’t get 80% of its previous years members to participate in the progress, and that does not bode well for the future. Especially in this day and age, when books are competing with so many other forms of entertainment, keeping the reading community engaged and growing is getting harder.

    If fandom was the strong, diverse, tolerant, inclusive crowd it claims to be, it wouldn’t have taken less than 250 people to tilt the awards in their direction this year, and that’s a point I don’t see addressed all that much since the nominations were announced. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.

    But that many people acting mostly in concert is not some sort of outlier, and can’t be just handwaved away as an aberration (despite some people fervent wishes). And the reaction I’ve seen is…disheartening. Instead of figuring out how to reach out and engage more potential voters, the various proposals at WorldCon appear to be about building the walls higher and the moat wider and deeper. I know there’s going to be at least one proposal to lower the cost of the supporting membership, how lost is that going to be in the various voting schemes being proposed?

  5. “The Sad Puppies 3 slate wasn’t decided in plain view. They took some suggestions on a blog then Correia, Torgersen and a few others engaged in some private deliberative process that often disregarded the public suggestions in favor of their pals and colleagues.”

    But you knew it was being conducted. Yes?

  6. The larger issue, for me anyways, is that the worlds most prestigious SF/F awards can’t get 80% of its previous years members to participate in the progress, and that does not bode well for the future.

    How is this different from previous years? The award has been a going concern for more than sixty years, and this isn’t a new issue. Somehow despite similar rates of participation in the past, the award has managed to get along quite nicely.

  7. People attend Worldcon for lots of reasons. The Hugos are one ring of a five-ring circus. It’s not as though Worldcon was built around the Hugos or exists to perpetuate the Hugos.

    The persistence of the idea that Worldcon fans don’t care about the Hugos is one way to tell how few Puppies have ever been to a Worldcon.

  8. @NickPheas: “And indeed whether HAL 9000 and Ziggy can really be considered robots.”

    No, but don’t forget about B.O.B., V.I.N.CENT, and Maximillian.

  9. Andrew said: “But you knew it was being conducted. Yes?”

    Many people knew it was being conducted, but were not aware that Correia and Beale were reaching out to a group of people who were primarily active in an entirely different fandom but who had a grudge against women and people who treated women as people in order to gin up the votes they needed for their campaign. That came kind of out of left field, and I don’t think it was unreasonable to be surprised by it.

  10. @Andrew:

    You are confusing effect with cause.

    You are talking as if “the worlds most prestigious SF/F awards” were something of a force of nature, an outside phenomenon that the WSFS just happens to be squatting on.

    But the Hugos are intimately connected to the WSFS.

    The only reason the Hugos have any status at all is all the work the members of the WSFS have put into them over the years.

    The Hugos are “the worlds most prestigious SF/F awards” because decades of thoughtful people who read and think about stories made intelligent, informed decisions as individuals about what stories to reward.

    And after a while, people started noticing that the stories the Hugos awarded were really good, that these awards weren’t just being handed out as fake prestige to any old pop sci-fi stuff.

    People started respecting the Hugos because the very people the Puppies sneer at the loudest did all the work and thought and care to make them respectable.

  11. “I was ignoring their existence. I was at Loncon; I was even at some of the discussions. Still did not take them seriously this year – last 2 years were not that spectacular.”

    Ah, Well…

    “And I still had a faith that even they won’t go and ruin it for all – we all are fans and so on (even VD). Well… without the second slate, I might have been right.”

    I think you would be right too.

  12. I asked before, I’ll ask again:

    If the Hugos are not the most prestigious award in SF, what is? Clearly awards have some quantity of prestige, and those quantities necessarily differ. So place the various awards in order, and you’ll find that the Hugos are on top. Prestige is orthogonal to the number of voters involved. The Hugos are prestigious due to longevity, due to the spectacle of the ceremony (most other SF awards are handed out at luncheons or brief ceremonies in hotel conference rooms), the positive effect it has on sales, and the number of classic novels it managed to select and new writers whose success it managed to predict over the years.

  13. John,

    If that were true there would have been more than the 200-250 participants…

  14. If that were true there would have been more than the 200-250 participants…

    I know VD likes to claim this. LC has even claimed this. But there’s really no evidence that it is even remotely true. There is no evidence that GG has much more than a handful of dedicated adherents at this point. It suits VD’s purposes to pretend they are some sort of massive force, but they really aren’t.

  15. I think GG’s influence in the Hugos is overblown, but

    a. GG isn’t that large
    b. there’s a big difference between what GG asks of people—sending emails to companies, participating in Twitter hashtags, and what the Puppies ask of people—spend $40 and vote thusly.

    To the extent that GG is involved, it’s likely just a handful of their cadre.

  16. Andrew: That’s fairly specious logic–GamerGate is not a formal movement directed by an individual that can be convinced to do things en masse. It is a mob of individuals who have united under the banner of harrassing Zoe Quinn to suicide…er, sorry, ethics in gaming journalism. For some reason, those two seem very difficult to differentiate when it comes to GamerGate.

    But the point is, it is perfectly possible for Correia and Beale to have reached out to get support from GamerGate and have had their signal insufficiently boosted, or to have had their request seen as insufficiently related to their core mission of getting Anita Sarkeesian to shut the hell up…er, of ethics in gaming journalism, so that only a couple of hundred people responded. The way to tell is not to look at the number of votes the Puppies got compared to the number of self-identified GamerGaters out there, but to look at the SP3/RP slate of this year compared to previous attempts. It clearly got a huge boost, and the main thing they did differently was explicitly request the assistance of GamerGaters in punishing SJWs, as has been documented repeatedly. I don’t even know why this is still being debated.

  17. a. GG isn’t that large
    b. there’s a big difference between what GG asks of people—sending emails to companies, participating in Twitter hashtags, and what the Puppies ask of people—spend $40 and vote thusly.

    To the extent that GG is involved, it’s likely just a handful of their cadre.

    GG has actually been pretty willing to drop cash:
    $17,000 for Eron Gjoni’s latest round of funding for his legal defense.
    $30,000 for the Honey Badgers’ fool’s errand against the Calgary expo – though there’s surely crossover with MRAs on that one
    a bevy of charity projects to try and prove that it’s all been about ethics in journalism.

    Finding a hundred or so folks willing to toss $40 more bucks at shaming a secret cabal of SJWs after having already been motivated to do so isn’t much of a stretch. Especially given that it’s the rabids who invoked GG, and it’s the rabids who won, and that SP3 was so much more successful than the previous iterations. The difference between this year and those is GG.

  18. GG is made of people who can regularly drop $60 on a toy and not notice. How much does a new gaming console cost? I don’t think wasting money is a concern for them.

  19. @Going to Maine: I think what Nick was saying was that it’s easy to believe that they could convince a couple hundred people to drop $40, but not necessarily three or four thousand people. Which is why GamerGate had an obvious effect, but not such a clear and unmitigated one that Correia couldn’t fig-leaf it with, “If GamerGate had helped me then I’d have gotten ten meeeeeelllllion votes and since I didn’t, they didn’t.”

    He’s making the same argument you are but phrased differently.

  20. GG is both few in numbers and provided the groundswell that swept the Hugos.

    Do you guys have some sort of boot camp that make you impervious to what should be painful cognitive dissonance?

  21. Do you guys have some sort of boot camp that make you impervious to what should be painful cognitive dissonance?

    Not really, 100 people willing to spend money to vote is quite small in absolute numbers, but more than enough to make a difference in the Hugo Elections.

  22. Aeou is the latest pseud in a long line of non-thinkers who picked up a bit of jargon from Wikipedia.

  23. GG is both few in numbers and provided the groundswell that swept the Hugos.

    One doesn’t need that many people to game an award like the Hugos, due to the numbers involved. The point is that GG almost certainly doesn’t have thousands of members waiting in the wings to perform a massive takeover like VD and LC have claimed they could. There just isn’t any evidence that there are more than a couple hundred dedicated members of the “movement”.

    In short, GG has taken their shot. Courting them won’t provide much more punch than has already been seen.

  24. aeou said: “GG is both few in numbers and provided the groundswell that swept the Hugos.”

    They are few in numbers relative to, say, the total number of people who have seen ‘Star Wars’. They are large in number relative to, say, the number of people who voted in lockstep in the Hugos this year.

    We have now covered the concept of “greater than” (>) and “fewer than” (<). Tomorrow we'll cover fractions.

  25. So basically the Hugos are small and insignificant nowadays?

    Nick, your ESP is broken. WP didn’t exist when i first heard or read that phrase.

  26. Heard *or* read? Sounds like a memory problem.

    And no, the Hugos are a fairly significant award voted on by a fairly small number of people. There isn’t a strong correlation between award significance and number of voters, not anywhere. The the Oscars are more important than the People’s Choice Awards, the Pulitzer is more important than a Goodreads poll etc.

  27. aeou said, “So basically the Hugos are small and insignificant nowadays?”

    No, and it would be nice if you didn’t rely on arguments predicated exclusively on your lack of reading comprehension. What I said was, “They are large in number relative to, say, the number of people who voted in lockstep in the Hugos this year.” The key phrase is, “in lockstep”. All of the other Hugo voters were actually voting for books, short stories, novellas, et cetera, that they actually liked, and even though there was significant overlap, they all had their own opinions and there was a wide scatter in nominations.

    Whereas the Puppies voted as they were told. And 200 ballots that were exactly identical easily trumped the diversified opinions that made up the much larger group. A tiny fraction of the group, say 200 out of a thousand, was the largest fraction because there were eight other groups of 100 each fighting for the remaining votes.

    (Hey, wow! We got to fractions today after all!)

  28. So basically the Hugos are small and insignificant nowadays?

    No. You are yet another example of the complete ignorance displayed by the Puppy supporters regarding reality. The Hugos are as significant as they have ever been, possibly more so than in previous years, which is a fact entirely unrelated to how many people vote for them. There is no magic number of voters an award must have before it is viewed as being prestigious.

    The Nebula Award, for example, has fewer people voting for it than the Hugo Award, and certainly fewer than vote for the Locus Award. And yet it has usually been regarded as being fairly similar in prestige to the Hugo and more prestige than the Locus.

    The idea that if you count noses, the award with the most voters is somehow the most important is such an idiotic notion that one has to conclude that you are either very young, or simply not very smart.

  29. Nick it is like you are not even trying. My memory is so bad that I can not even tell you if I heard or read it in my first or second language. I imagine it is easier to remember how and when you first heard of a concept if you make it your life’s work.

    The funny thing is that GG is or was largely ignorant about the SP. There had been two tweets by an unknown gger named daddy warpig and a few posts by VD by the time the nominations were closed or maybe even after. VD had nohing to do with gg until he suddenly started posting about them a few months back and GG still haven’t noticed him. An even funnier thing is that VD posted his slate after registration for nominations were closed. You have not yet seen the power of the rabid puppies much less gg. Not a good move to call out gg in those nice unbiased articles in the mainstream press.

    You guys are like a bunch of blind clowns trying to circumnavigate a planet covered in rakes.

  30. @aeou: “An even funnier thing is that VD posted his slate after registration for nominations were closed.”

    Yup, that’s generally how it works. First you make sure everyone’s inside the tent, then you tell ’em what to do.

    Wait – you didn’t think his slate went up after the deadline to nominate, did you? Because that would indeed be a much different, and vastly sillier, thing.

  31. I said: I think GG’s influence in the Hugos is overblown

    You said: The funny thing is that GG is or was largely ignorant about the SP.

    If you were anything other than either a troll or a buffoon, you’d realize that your points coincide with my points more or less exactly.

  32. Andrew: “Instead of figuring out how to reach out and engage more potential voters, the various proposals at WorldCon appear to be about building the walls higher and the moat wider and deeper.”

    No, the proposals are about ensuring that organized slates are unable to completely override popularity with individual voters. The height of the “wall” and the width and the depth of whatever “moat” exists will stay exactly the same.

    But you knew that already. You’re just trying to reframe it as an attack on Puppies, because something something SJWs something something.

  33. You have not yet seen the power of the rabid puppies much less gg.

    Yeah, I’m pretty sure that we have. You’re a fringe on a fringe. You can get organized enough to cause some chaos, but you’re not significant enough to do much more than you’ve already done.

    Not a good move to call out gg in those nice unbiased articles in the mainstream press.

    Your narrative isn’t selling to anyone. Keep whining about how people telling the truth about RP and GG are “biased”. That won’t make you look even more dopey than you do already.

  34. There had been two tweets by an unknown gger named daddy warpig

    What does “unknown” mean, here? Aren’t many of GG anonymous/pseudonymous?

    I note this comment on Correia’s blog (with a timestamp long before the puppy slates were published):

    Daddy Warpig, on October 24, 2014 at 7:58 am said:

    Daddy Warpig here, reporting from neck deep in #GamerGate.

  35. aeou said: “You have not yet seen the power of the rabid puppies much less gg.”

    Why is it that when these guys are proven wrong they try to change the subject to how scary they are?

  36. John – Why is it that when these guys are proven wrong they try to change the subject to how scary they are?

    You ever see a scared puppy? All their hair sticks up to make them seem bigger. It’s adorable of course.

  37. @John Seavey:

    “Witness the firepower of this fully benevolent and ethical consumer movement!” 🙂

  38. aeou: “You have not yet seen the power of the rabid puppies much less gg.”

    [yawn]

  39. You guys are like a bunch of blind clowns trying to circumnavigate a planet covered in rakes.

    I would read this story.

  40. Nick Mamatas said:

    People attend Worldcon for lots of reasons. The Hugos are one ring of a five-ring circus. It’s not as though Worldcon was built around the Hugos

    Very true so far. But…

    or exists to perpetuate the Hugos.

    IIRC there are exactly three things the current WSFS constitution requires every Worldcon to do: hold a business meeting, administer site selection for a future Worldcon, and administer the Hugos. While the Hugos weren’t there at the beginning, they’re certainly a core function now.

  41. WSFS is the society that puts on Worldcon but it is not the same thing *as* Worldcon. Is there anything in the constitution that even says that the Hugo winners must be announced at Worldcon? A quick glance at the relevant section doesn’t seem to say that.

  42. Nick Mamatas: The absence of a rule requiring the Hugo winners to be announced at Worldcon is comparable to that scene in A Few Good Men where the lawyer played by Tom Cruise proves everything you need to know isn’t in the infantry manual.

  43. If one wishes to live by legalism, one will surely die by it too.

    The point was that the low ratio of Worldcon members to Hugo nominators doesn’t mean very much, because people go to Worldcon for lots of reasons, which may have nothing to do with the Hugos, or only casually to do with them. I go to the Masquerade most years, but couldn’t tell you anything of the ins and outs of that part of the convention. Plenty of people “like” the Hugos, but don’t vote or care overmuch about how sausage is made, even though they have a chance to fill the casings themselves.

  44. @Nick – It doesn’t matter if you agree with him, as a non-puppy you are definitionally wrong at all times.

  45. The point was that the low ratio of Worldcon members to Hugo nominators doesn’t mean very much, because people go to Worldcon for lots of reasons, which may have nothing to do with the Hugos, or only casually to do with them.

    I’m on board with that. Even fewer people go to attend the business meeting, or bother to vote in site selection (most years).

  46. As it happens, Worldcon is actually only required to have a single program item: The WSFS Business Meeting. The Hugo ceremony isn’t required, and it turns out that trophies aren’t required, but if you give winners trophies, you have to use the design based on the McKnight/Jason/Westin rocket. Having a Hugo ceremony and giving trophies are in the nature of those “unwritten rules” that some people reading here claim don’t exist.

    The fact that the WSFS Business Meeting is the only required program item is something prone to give the Programming Division heartburn. At least in theory, the Business Meeting could decline to adjourn, and whatever is scheduled for the room after the scheduled adjournment would be out of luck, because the BM is guaranteed. I’m doing my best to keep the agenda for this year’s meetings under sufficient control that such a collision between functions doesn’t happen, because I rather expect that the panelists/attendees for that hypothetical following panel wouldn’t be too pleased to see their event overwhelmed by a bunch of parliamentarians.

    This isn’t as theoretical as you might think: the deadlocked Westercon Site Selection at Westercon 64 in San Jose was in exactly that boat, and bumped several program items, much to the panelists’ and audiences’ dismay when they turned up to find a debating society clogging up the Fairmont Hotel’s Club Regent room.

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