I mentioned elsewhere, recently, that I’ve spent my share of time arguing with street preachers and the like. There’s a special kind of determined antagonism towards reality they carry with them – I call it street-preacher stupid – and the best you can do at any point is to argue for the crowd, and let the preachers make themselves look like… themselves, really.

In that spirit, I present the following:

Sci-Fi Pundant insists that Worldcon defrauded its membership via the “asterisk” joke/charitable fundraiser, declaring the asterisks to be awards given outside the rules.

And, on the Puppies losing their captured categories to No Award:

And again, on the Puppies losing to No Award:

There is not a big enough facepalming gif in the world for this, so I will not bother appending one. h/t to Jim C. Hines for the unicorn-iconed claimant. Enjoy.

eta: Wait, on second thought, I came up with something:

There we go.

eta2: I’ve added a rather long quote in comments here. You may find it worthy as a fourth example.

This part of a series of posts on the Sad/Rabid Puppy candidate slate-based capture of the Hugo Awards, and resulting fallout.

I’m too sleepy to write up a big Business Meeting post tonight – I caught up on about two weeks of email and worked on harmonies all day, that’s a bit on the side of brain-eating – so I’m going to point to this instead:

All that smoke and all those strange skies we saw at Sasquan? They were mostly due to these fires. There are other fires as well, but those are the biggest ones. It wouldn’t hurt to see about throwing them a little dosh.

Taken from Pretty Terrible’s post on the Hugos, and a puppy-slate-free alternate-universe ballot, built from the real-world voting data, released after the awards were given out:

That last section? It’s a picture of the sound of my heart breaking, just a little bit.

So. Where do we start?

It is far too late to start at the beginning, so let’s start where we last left off.

Those of us who have been calling for a NO AWARD vote above any slate nominee for the Hugo have, I am told, won. We have doubled the number of NO AWARDs given throughout the previous history of the awards, and blocked the meaningful slate candidates pretty much in their entirety. We are being congratulated, and for that, I thank you.

But I cannot consider this winning. I consider it… oh, let’s call it the least bad possible disaster given the position in which their machinations put us. That’s important. It shows that the large influx of supporting members who voted were not a Puppy rush. It shows that World Science Fiction Society fandom cares about the Hugo awards quite a bit, in fact, and thank you very much. It shows that gaming the system and violating decades of voting tradition will not be rewarded. Well done, fandom.

But it is not a “win.” It is not even a victory, because it does not end anything.

There are many who have said that a resounding defeat for political slates on this order would discourage them, and they would not return again. They say that any changes to the Hugo voting system are premature, even though any such changes would require at least two years – and two rounds of endorsement by WSFS fandom – to take effect.

That assertion has consistently struck me as naive at best. Movements driven by ressentiment are actually fuelled by defeat, at least in the short term. It merely proves to them that what they rightfully own and deserve has been stolen, unjustly, by the undeserving – which was in fact the line on Twitter from slate supporters on the night of the Hugos.

And further, as you can see in the tweet above, Rabid leader Vox Day has already promised another run at it, telling Wired that his intent has been to destroy the Hugo awards altogether – to, and I quote, “leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were.” Again in his words, “All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You — one massive gesture of contempt.”

He also claims to have an army of people who are not fans at all, and are “very anti-SJW [and] said, ‘Okay, we want to get in on this.'” And recruitment into the GamerGate misogynist crowd was certainly ramped up that night.

I don’t know that this continuing activism and agitation will convince the honest naysayers – those against reform for non-slate-related reasons, who are convinced this is an anomaly – that this problem is ongoing. I hope it will, but… I have my doubts.

However.

My big worry was that there would be a large and organised Rabid presence at Worldcon, and/or at the business meeting. I actually did not think it was likely – though signing in to the first meeting immediately after Lou “Let’s Set the Cops on a Guest of Honour” Antonelli didn’t make me feel any better.

But a distinguishing characteristic of the GamerGate phenomenon has been an unwillingness to appear in person. It’s not completely unknown – a GamerGate faction lied their way into a booth at a gaming convention last year, and disrupted several panels before they were ejected – but it’s rare.

And in one of those cases where no news really is good news, there was no organised disruption. There were a couple of very minor incidents – such as a really nasty flyer left anonymously on the flyer rack, claiming to be from SFWA – but nothing on a genuinely large scale.

And there were self-identified members of the Puppies present. But they were of the Sad faction, at least some of whom are actual fans – regardless of their actions regarding these Hugos – and had every right to be there. And they behaved, for the most part. One did leap to accuse me of slander during the Business Meeting, but sat down when told he was both wrong by definition and that his motion was Not Well Taken by the Chair. There were a couple of dramatic Storming Outs – including one by Lou Antonelli someone unidentified (see comments) at the Hugo awards ceremony – but that’s all well within the range of ordinary fannishness. I’ve seen bigger drama over points of canon in Tolkien.

So as is the history with these things, when it comes to taking action in person… you don’t tend to see these people showing up so much. Will that continue? We can’t know, but we can hope.

And so, while the business meetings may’ve run very long, and spanned four days instead of three, we got a lot done. In particular, there are two voting reform proposals which passed first reading and were passed on for final ratification next year, one of which I support strongly, the other of which I oppose just as strongly. And I will talk about both, later this week.
 

This part of a series of posts on the Sad/Rabid Puppy candidate slate-based capture of the Hugo Awards, and resulting fallout.

WHY DO OUR NEW ICE CUBE TRAYS HAVE POLARITY?

I await an explanation, Rubbermaid.

Microsoft Windows 10 will spy on your kids and email you regular activity reports. It includes things like “websites they visited” and “terms they’ve looked up in search engines like Bing, Google, or Yahoo! Search.”

No, Really, They Send You Email.

Leaving the fundamentally disturbing creepiness of this aside for the moment, if that’s possible, I have to ask the Microsoft Systems Group something.

IS THERE NO ONE QUEER LEFT IN MICROSOFT SYSTEMS? NOBODY? Nobody who had to stay in the closet until they could get the fuck out and then not have to be made homeless when they got disowned? Nobody over there who had to worry about what crazy-ass “reparative therapy” they’d get thrown into? Nobody who had to think about whether they’d get beaten back into conformity?

Because there are a lot of queer kids out there in that position right now.

What the fuck, Microsoft? What. the. fuck.

My new game is “play my warmup songs using the most difficult variant chord fingerings I can find.” It’s kind of hilarious how different everything sounds.

This sounds kind of pointless, but it’s not. First, it’s good to practice your obscure chord variants, and second, and more importantly, a lot of these are minor bar chords, and that’s not a thing you need a lot of, but every so often That Other Band You Play For might throw you a song with a bunch of chords like Ebm and G#m and literally the only way to play those in my tuning is with extended minor bars and HEY GUESS WHAT I HAVEN’T BEEN DOING LATELY!

Even though I know, like, three different minor bar patterns. I just don’t actually use them for anything.

So now it’s time to pay the price. Kohaku is currently eight strings of pain, and I’m developing callouses in places on my fingers I’ve never had callouses before.

It’s kind of fun, tho’. Other than the pain part.

The Sasquan Worldcon Committee have decided to override their harassment committee’s initial decision to to refund Mr. Antonelli’s membership – Mr. Antonelli being the Puppy slate nominee who attempted a slow-mo SWAT of David Gerrold – and allow him to attend the convention.

In the executive committee’s statement, they say that Mr. Gerrold asked them to do this; that Mr. Gerrold believes that as a Hugo nominee – however dubious – Mr. Antonelli should be allowed to attend. As Mr. Gerrold was the target of the SWAT, I can accept that decision, if somewhat grudgingly.

But they did not mention Ms. Cuinn, who received a fleet of death and rape threats after withdrawing her acceptance of Mr. Antonelli’s story following this matter. I have expressed my displeasure, saying that they should’ve contacted her, too, and made sure she was okay with that.

They have replied, saying they did talk to her and she did agree with the reversal in this case. eta: THIS IS CONTESTED. THIS HAS BEEN REDACTED. See below. I can grudgingly accept that, as well. (Tho’ – let’s be honest here – once Mr. Gerrold gave his nod, there was no way she couldn’t go along without being socially eviscerated.)

But that they did so was not in their statement, so I had no way of knowing. I have suggested her assent in this belongs there, as well; at least one person from the committee agrees.

Given that the systematic harassment of women through rape and death threats has been such an endemic problem over the last few years, I am somewhat disappointed they didn’t realise that needed to be addressed publicly. However, the more important part is that they did contact her, and did get her signoff. I just wish they had taken a moment to say so.

eta: More and more complicated. Ms. Cuinn says she was not contacted about banning Mr. Antonelli, and did not sign off on that with the concom. She says that she was contacted about whether she wanted an investigation, but that’s different. She also says at that post (as a personal statement?) that Mr. Antonelli shouldn’t be banned because of what he threw at her – even though she does not believe his apology or that he didn’t know his crowd would go after her. But that’s not the same as signing off on the committee’s decision.

eta2: Sasquan concom member Marah Searle-Kovacevic apologises for her misstatement, and confirms Ms. Cuinn’s version. [grab]

eta3: This leaves me in a rather odd position, really. Not in any sense of “what’s being said by whom,” but in the sense of how I feel about this. I was grudgingly okay based on misinformation, and I am less so on the actual information. But how much, I do not know.

I mean, this is a high level of abuse. Even if the Slo-mo SWAT letter undoubtedly had “crackpot” written all over it, it’s still a crackpot dousing somebody in honey and whistling for bears. (The crackpot part comes in when you apparently think that bears care if you whistle.)

And then you get the hounds let loose on Ms. Cuinn. Yeah, I get it, it didn’t take place at the convention, and didn’t involve a guest. But it was direct fallout from an event that totally did, and the scooch-scooch-scooch-scooch-phew-we-can-not-care-about-this-on-a-technicality doesn’t entirely sit well with me.

No sir – I don’t like it. Not one little bit. And I don’t have a good answer beyond that.

eta4: Pretty Terrible is Pretty Clear about how she feels about it.
 

This part of a series of posts on the Sad/Rabid Puppy candidate slate-based capture of the Hugo Awards, and resulting fallout.

Lou Antonelli is a writer and voluntary part of the Sad Puppy slate, who has clearly stated his support for their political agenda. He has received a couple of nominations due to their slate voting. He has written screeds against the godless leftists who oppose the Puppy slate, and has accused anti-Slate activists of engaging in organised criminal activity:

[Opponents of the Slates] should hope there is not a sweep of No Awards because they crossed the line in attacking some authors into that’s called “exaction” under organized crime statutes. They threatened someone’s income or livelihood. It’s not extortion because no physical threat was employed, but when people say certain authors will never get published again, or that they will have to use a pen name in the future, they are committing exaction. Certain editors at Tor books – and one of the MCs at the Hugo ceremony – are guilty of this.

And now it has come out that he wrote a letter to the Spokane Police Department, urging surveillance of Guest of Honour David Gerrold as “insane” and “a public danger.” Here are his words, as quoted at the link:

I personally wrote a letter addressed to the police chief in Spokane and said I thought the man was insane and a public danger and needs to be watched when the convention’s going on, and I mean it. I attached my business card. I said this guy’s inciting to violence. Somebody—a weak-minded might attack somebody because of his relentless strength of abuse. I think, honestly, I think he belongs in a secure psychiatric facility.

He has apologised for this, now that the word is out. Despite the order and proximity of those events, several people have noted the apparent sincerity of the apology. He has also posted on Facebook that he’s had an upcoming story cancelled by the publisher, and says he deserves that.

As for me, well, the only difference between this and SWATing is the reaction time, and I’m very glad he chose to write a letter instead of calling 911.

I already lacked any sympathy for the Puppy crowd, as my writings clearly show. But this – this is genuinely a new low. This is slow-motion GamerGate bullshit right here.

I was honestly thinking that the outrageous portions of this mess had died down, and that perhaps things would be just fine. But then we get things like this, and maybe not.
 
eta: So this happened:

Less than 12 hours before today's publishing decision led to getting emailed rape and death threats, because evil SJWs something something.

— Carrie Cuinn (@CarrieCuinn) August 9, 2015

And Lou Antonelli is telling people to knock it off, you jerks, you aren’t helping:

Ok, if anyone I know out there is contacting Carrie Cuinn and castigating her for the decision not to publish my story, knock it off. She and Lakeside Circus have their right to free expression, also. Lambasting her is certainly not helping things.

Insofar as the story is now available, and to make the best of a bad situation (since it probably will never be published anywhere anyhow – or anything I write in the future, for that matter), I will drop it in here now, so maybe some people can enjoy it.

eta2: However, turns out he’d edited Carrie’s letter to delete context and add identifying information before throwing it out there to his fans. That “knock it off” of his has a whole lot less value to me now. To me, it now feels less like “don’t do that” and more like, “okay, I figure she’s had enough.” Wow.

eta3: Pretty Terrible points to other cases where he’s done stuff like this before. So this isn’t a one-off.

eta4: I talked with members of the Worldcon concom about their decision to override their harassment policy and their harassment committee’s decision to refund Mr. Antonelli’s membership and bar him from the convention. In their statement, they noted that Mr. Gerrold had asked them to do so; I can accept that, grudgingly. But they did not mention Ms. Cuinn, about which I expressed my displeasure. They have now said they did talk to her and she did agree with the reversal in this case. I’ve suggested that belongs in the statement; they agree.

This part of a series of posts on the Sad/Rabid Puppy candidate slate-based capture of the Hugo Awards, and resulting fallout.

The Stonewall Riots – the revolt that started the modern queer rights movement – were started mostly by the drag queens and transwomen, with a bulldyke, a black drag queen, and a transwoman all resisting arrest just for being queer.

Stormé DeLarverie, the bulldyke daughter of a black mother and white father, urged the crowd to action after she was beaten with a club while being arrested. Marsha P. Johnson, the black drag queen in question, is generally believed to have thrown the first brick that really got resistance going. She and the above-mentioned transwoman, Ms. Griffin-Gracy, are all acknowledged as leaders in the revolt. Sylvia Rivera, another transgendered woman, was also important.

All this is true unless, of course, you’re watching the contemptible movie version coming out later this year. From the trailer:

If you watch this trailer, this message is pretty damn clear: a straight-looking gay white guy turned things around and made this revolt happen. The trailer is telling you a straight-up lie. It’s whitewashing, it’s erasure, it’s elimination of women and people of colour from history. It’s contemptible. And it’s routine.

The director calls it “fictionalised.” Yeah, fictionalised to change the actual people of history into a straight-looking white dude.

Do not support this movie.