There’s a rumour floating around that the Puppies have given up on hopes of getting any awards out of this Hugo slate awards capture trick they’ve pulled, and are just NO AWARDing every category en masse. Note that’s different to what I said to do, which was vote for non-Puppy candidates, then NO AWARD.

I mean, seriously, in a single-party election, if you managed to defeat the only party? You must be pretty good. That deserves votes.

I first heard about it from this tweet:

Regardless, here’s Adam Troy-Castro talking about the strategy, and what he thinks it means. (Related: “Why I’m Disliked: A Ten Point List,” by John Scalzi.)

However, it’s definitely not a united bloc on this strategy; the oberpuppyführer has been writing against the FULL NO AWARD suite, specifically in response to proud Puppy slate candidate Michael Z. Williamson’s call to bring the whole thing down. Vox also claims they still have not brought their full weight to bear in this matter; we’ll see about that. (Yes, I will occasionally read Vox Day so you don’t have to.)

I think most of this is just the latest “claim victory no matter what happens” strategy. I also don’t think they have a lot of credibility left outside their own circles, so I’m pretty sure that doesn’t matter, unless Vox still has some 1930s-esque dreams of CONTROLLING THE FUTURE THROUGH SCIENCE FICTION FANDOM! Which he might do, given that’s pretty much when he’s from.

Either way, voting ends soon, and we will all know what happens then. See you in Spokane!
 

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

I can’t tell you – no that’s a lie, I won’t tell you – why all these people are busily installing a concrete facility under this major highway near the Lair. However, I can tell you that they think it’s a new stream culvert.

heh.

But construction is interesting, so have some site photos.

Also, there is an alpaca. How is this relevant? You may never know.

Larger copies of the pictures at Flickr.

B&N is shuttering Nook in every location except the UK and US. Meanwhile, even here, Anna discovered that Barnes and Noble’s new website only talks to Internet Explorer on Windows. Nothing else will let her log in. If you look at the code, it seems to be testing for IE versions then throwing some obsfucated JavaScript code at you that doesn’t work on anything but recent Explorer.

For the record, Internet Explorer is currently about 12% of web traffic.

Interestingly, if I tell Safari to ID itself at IE 8 or 9, I can get a login box. It’s throwing different code in those cases. Identifying as IE 10 creates the same behaviour as the Safari user agent string. There are also some reports that for other people – at least some percentage of users – it works on Chrome on Windows. But it’s definitely not working here, tonight.

This is crazy. They’ve locked out as much as 88% of potential customers in North America. It doesn’t work on any Safari, including mobile. It doesn’t work on any version of Chrome, or Firefox, that Anna can find to test.

This is amazing. And once you do manage to get logged in, all you get really is a tile-display of books you’ve bought and no option to download them or anything – the links just go to those books’ sales pages. It’s a disaster.

I hope Kobo buys their Nook customer base soon, like they did with Sony. Amazon needs some sort of ePub competition. Nook clearly doesn’t want to be it.

eta: Apparently some people can log in on various shades of Chrome on Windows, but it’s inconsistent. Anna was able to log in on Safari on Macintosh this morning – for a while.

Wow, I am angry.

About a week ago, Comcast mail servers started bouncing our email again, with their servers reporting 554: no reverse DNS, and reporting our IP addresses as IPv6.

They’ve done this before, twice. Once for the whole world; once just for their servers. They start exposing us somehow as IPv6, and we have no reverse DNS or even any static IPv6 addresses, so of course there’s no reverse DNS entries. That’s why we have IPv4 addresses; for exactly this. So we can deliver mail.

I’ve been calling and getting callbacks and being tossed around to different departments (all of which say this is not their job) and having the ticket silently closed since June 2nd. This is day six of this.

Comcast Tier 2 just called me back, and told me it’s not their fault, and they didn’t do anything, and it’s our network that’s broken and that our Cisco router is allocating IPv6 addresses. And somehow our mail server, which does not run DHCP and which I personally set up as IPv4, is picking that up, apparently only when talking with Comcast mail servers.

Except WE DO NOT EVEN OWN A FUCKING CISCO ROUTER. They repeatedly insisted that we did. We do not. I know what’s on our network. I know what I’ve bought. We do not have a CISCO router. We have never had a CISCO router. He insisted he could see one nonetheless.

And they will not do anything.

They’re insisting it’s our fault and they’ve never done anything like this before, and they have no records of anything like this happening before, even though they have done this and fixed it twice before, on their end both times. This guy claims to have no record of that, despite the fact that a previous tech claimed to have found a record of it.

They also simultaneously insisted that we were self-generating IPv6 addresses and using them (but apparently only when talking to their servers? Sure, that makes sense) and that our gateway is set up not to pass IPv6 traffic, even though their servers are seeing us as IPv6.

And he refused to do anything, and refused to let me talk to anyone else.

I guess we need to find a new upstream IP provider, because I have no idea what to do next.

Also, I was pretty pissed off that despite the fact that I’ve been the one doing all this calling (since always) that I clearly had somebody who comes in and “does our networking work for [us]” and I needed to talk to them. No, fuck you. I’ve implemented more mail protocols than you’ve used, you shithead.

Jesus fucking christ.

Any suggestions? I’m out of ideas. Well, other than seeing if I can screw with something on their modem to break whatever tunnelling they’re doing, if that’s what they’re doing. That might help.

eta: I’ve confirmed they’re wrong about our gateway not passing IPv6, we can move IPv6 pings, so I can at least try to make that go. Or more accurately, not go.

eta2: Talking with Joi, a friend who does IP work. (Note: SHE IS NOT A COMCAST EMPLOYEE.) Comcast recently made some internal changes to pass IPv6 around better internally. (I was actually talking about this indirectly with a Tier 1 support tech earlier today, which more or less confirms that what she’s heard has truth behind it.) But it still stops at their network boundary. We’re thinking that enabled some selfhost IPv6 functionality.

eta3: Yeah, okay, traceroute/traceroute6 games confirm it, and, incidentally, explains some of the weird geoIP results I’ve been seeing recently.

eta4: Hey, lookie thar, they did! They also may have moved the IPv6 boundary. That part must’ve been about a week ago. Might’ve been nice if ANYONE I TALKED TO HAD THOUGHT OF MENTIONING THAT. We could’ve fixed this in 15 minutes. But no, I had to get handed off a lot and sneered at instead.

eta5: Okay, so, best we can tell, at some point in the recent past, Comcast made internal IPv6 changes that silently enabled IPv6 traffic on the modem (despite this guy saying our modem wasn’t passing IPv6 even as it was, which was obviously bullshit) and caused the Debian kernel to activate the IPv6 side of traffic.

But that didn’t actually have any noticeable effect, because we weren’t delivering mail to anyone that way. Which means at that point in time, IPv6 routing stopped before reaching internal comcast.net mail servers. And sometime about a week ago, they must’ve moved their internal IPv6 routing boundary (which is what said Tier 1 tech was talking about, I think), which caused us to start seeing their mail servers with IPv6 traffic. And since we’re coming at them as a customer, they prefer IPv6, which made us silently start talking in IPv6.

But since that boundary is and was still internal to their internal WAN, nobody else was seeing us as IPv6, but were instead seeing us as IPv4, as they should’ve been.

This, we can do something about on our end. I don’t mind making changes if I know there’s a reason to do so. I don’t hate IPv6. But I do hate being told that they didn’t do anything (untrue), that it’s all our fault (untrue), that we made changes that we didn’t (untrue), that we own equipment we don’t have (untrue), and that I clearly do not know what I’m talking about.

Comcast Business, I am very unhappy. This should’ve been a 20-minute support call, tops. Instead, we have this. Wow, I hate monopolies.

eta6: Moved up from comments: We’re pretty sure the “CISCO router” he insisted we have as our own personal equipment and somehow do not know we have is, in fact, the router built into the linksys modem that is their equipment.

I suggested that to him when he kept insisting “your CISCO router is handing off IPv6 traffic,” but he blew that off and said no, that’s impossible, it had to be equipment of ours. But we’re pretty sure he’s wrong and that’s what he was seeing.

eta7: Just for the record, Comcast’s twitter account support got ahold of us, apologised, and threw us a month of internet uplink credit. That’s good of them, and I appreciate being partially comped for my time and inconvenience. Apparently ComcastCares is the SMERSH of Comcast Technical Support’s world. (They solve problems, via elimination. And store credit. Whichever seems best at the time.) But really, that kind of department – the kind that finds angry people on social media and then steps in – might be better off working to prevent this sort of thing to start.

If you are one of the people who think the Confederate States of America was about anything other than slavery and white supremacy, you are flatly wrong. You aren’t wrong on interpretation, or importance, or emphasis, you are flatly, utterly, completely wrong on facts.

Don’t take it from me, take it from then-newly-elected Vice President Alexander H. Stephens of the Confederate States of America:

The new [Confederate] constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. … Our new government is founded… its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

— Savannah, Georgia, March 21, 1861

Emphasis added. It was about slavery. The whole damn project was about slavery.

Here’s an article with some more direct quotes. Such as Texas’s February 2nd, 1861 declaration of secession:

Texas… was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery – the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits – a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. …

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable. …

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.

It was about slavery.

Here’s soon-to-be-Confederate General Benning of Georgia, writing to Virginia, urging secession following Georgia’s vote:

What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction … that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery… If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. By the time the north shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. … The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy.”

It was about slavery.

Not every Confederate state listed their reasons for secession and formation of the Confederacy. Some kept it short, two or three paragraphs. But every Confederate state which made a list of reasons went with slavery.

Here’s South Carolina’s declaration of secession, adopted December 24, 1860, listing their complaints:

…an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress [regarding return of escaped slaves –sb] or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed… In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. …

Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States.

… A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

It was about slavery.

Here’s the Mississippi declaration of secession:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

It was about slavery.

Here’s Georgia declaration of secession, passed Tuesday, January 29, 1861:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slaveholding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. …

The Presidential election of 1852 resulted in the total overthrow of the advocates of restriction and their party friends. Immediately after this result the anti-slavery portion of the defeated party resolved to unite all the elements in the North opposed to slavery and to stake their future political fortunes upon their hostility to slavery everywhere. This is the party two whom the people of the North have committed the Government. They raised their standard in 1856 and were barely defeated. They entered the Presidential contest again in 1860 and succeeded.

The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers. …

Such are the opinions and such are the practices of the Republican party, who have been called by their own votes to administer the Federal Government under the Constitution of the United States. We know their treachery; we know the shallow pretenses under which they daily disregard its plainest obligations. If we submit to them it will be our fault and not theirs.

…their avowed purpose is to subvert our society and subject us not only to the loss of our property [slaves] but the destruction of ourselves, our wives, and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides. To avoid these evils we resume the powers which our fathers delegated to the Government of the United States, and henceforth will seek new safeguards for our liberty, equality, security, and tranquility.

It was about slavery. They said it was about slavery. They said their government was founded and based on slavery and white supremacy; that it was the corner-stone of their government.

I’m pretty sure that means it was about slavery.

eta: More, from before and after the war.

eta2: Here are even more, including Jefferson Davis and others.

Sure, as a floating lair, it looks fairly swank, and the only ethical way to own this monstrosity is to steal it, so that’s fair. But when you see rooms like this?

No.

This is Bond Bait. It’s engineered to make you fall into a variety of the Bad Supervillain traps, most notably monologuing about your own plans and awkward we’re-not-so-different speeches.

I’m sure you do.

Nobody needs another one of those speeches. Nobody. This lair? Give it a pass.

It’s really important for many kinds of instrumentalists to maintain good callouses, particularly zouk, mandolin, and guitar players. There’s a rumour that Stevie Ray Vaughn used to superglue his callouses back on if they fell off.

Somehow my left-hand (fretboard side) callouses have all disappeared. I’ve been playing all week but in the shower yesterday I was like, “wait, my fingertips on my left hand feel really soft, what the hell?” now, well, YEP THEY SURE ARE.

A few hours of playing tonight seems to be bringing them back, but… da hell?

I’ve never seen this before – a puzzle game for capcha on some Livejournal comment pages:

queen to queen’s level 3

Yeah, I had to do a puzzle to leave a comment. Also to edit the comment.

There must be some truly severe spambots out there at this point is all I can say. Damn.

Oh, also, we saw Jurassic World. It’s much better than I was led to believe, on several axises, and easily the best since the original – which is not a high bar, of course, but I don’t mean it as a backhanded compliment. It was genuinely fun.

I didn’t get into it enough to write my own review, but Anna posted one over here. I guess the only thing I’d say about Anna’s reaction is that the shit Claire got for not picking up on her nephews personally the first day there.. I really read that as fallout from her sister’s impending divorce. I’ve seen divorcing parents ramp the “it’s all about me” neediness up to 12 before, and for me, anyway, it felt very much like that.

Sadly, another character also gave her shit for not dropping everything and attending to the kids, too. Just not as much. I’m sorry, did you miss the part where she had a serious job and where events were unfolding?

Regardless; better and less annoying than I was lead to expect, and well done making me be actively on the velociraptors’ side. Team Velociraptor. Go Blue.

I have a Google Voice number that I set up a couple of weeks ago solely to give to PayPal, given their new horrible data-mining and cold-calling-by-anyone terms of service.

I have given this number to quite literally no one outside my lair. (And not even everyone in it!) I even added it to the Do Not Call registry. So guess what I got today that could only have come through one place?

Die in a fire, Paypal.

If you have a PayPal account, get a throwaway number for it, because the spam robocalls are coming.

So, as predictably as rain is wet, the Puppies have declared a boycott on Tor Books unless they get a swath of demands met, including apologies from Tor for true statements made by people who are not Tor employees. While the most famous of the white supremacists in the Puppy movement didn’t start it – this guy did – the oberpuppyführer has, of course, endorsed it. So has the Internet’s biggest Korrasami hater, and some others, too.

Anyway, the demands are ludicrous, but to summarise:

• Tor must publicly apologize for writings by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Moshe Feder, Irene Gallo, and John Scalzi that “demonize, denigrate, slander and lie about the ‘Puppies’ campaigns”
• Tor must “publicly reprimand those individuals for stepping over the line”
• Tor must “publicly indicate that it is putting in place policies to prevent any recurrence of such issues.”

See, this is exactly what you get when you hang one of your own out to dry for making personal comments on their own Facebook page like Tor did. You get escalation. So I’m honestly having a hard time feeling sorry for Tor Books here; it was as predictable a piece of politics as one can imagine. And I’m not just saying that in retrospect; I said so at the time.

Now mind you, this “boycott” is pretty must sad-trumpet amateur hour for several reasons, not the least is probable inability to make visible economic impact. As Vox himself admitted, he hasn’t bought anything from Tor in years, and I doubt all that many of the others who are going to sign on to this thing have either. A few, sure, absolutely – with the hilarious side-effect that means the writers they might be able to hurt are the ones on their side.

But even were it all of them, I have to wonder – how small a pond do they think this is? As I’ve, again, written before, if you want an effective boycott, you need three things: 1) a specific and reachable goal, 2) the ability to have economic effect, and 3) a functional alternative to the thing you’re boycotting.

They don’t have these conditions met. They have maybe half a point on item one: there are stated demands. But the thing is, those demands are mostly stalking horses for greater goals, and the Puppies have already proven they will unilaterally escalate. Therefore, no one sensible should assume those demands will be stable here, either. Meet them, more will arise. It’s like Hydra.

Plus, and this should not be left unsaid, their demands are simply ludicrous. But moving on.

They have more than half a point on item three, the alternative – they have a mishmash of selfpub (which, as we know, is Real Publishing for Real Men Now, apparently) and small-press, particularly the Oberpuppyfurher’s small press. (“Shocked! Shocked to discover there might be economic motive to my political boycott!”) Plus, there are plenty of other publishing houses. So maybe a full point, but so much of their work is Campbell-reject shenanigans that I don’t think it really matters.

And most importantly, they have exactly fuck and all on item two. “Oh look, a few dozen people who hate us and don’t read what we publish are calling a boycott.” “‘K.” The whole “muzzle a whole fleet of people or we’ll ruin you” threat doesn’t have a lot of bite if you can’t pull it off. And their 10%-of-the-vote crowd simply can’t.

Sure, they managed to game the Hugo system with numbers that small, because nobody else was block voting; parties vs. no party always win. But that trick doesn’t work when everybody is throwing dollars around for things they actually want and there’s no shortlist to pack. It’s not the kind of closed environment where these tricks work.

Plus – and this is probably my favourite part of this particular fail – the political movement whose original rallying cry was “Heinlein couldn’t win a Hugo today” is now boycotting Robert Heinlein’s publisher.

I guess keeping him off the Hugo ballot this year just wasn’t enough. Man, they just must hate Heinlein.

So, in conclusion: doomed.

eta: Steven Savile on Facebook claims Puppy leader Torgersen told him this was all about exposure, and wasn’t ever about the Hugo awards, back at a Writers of the Future event. And lj:yamamanama reminds us that one of the boycott organisers threatened to sue them for… boycotting that organiser’s vanity-press publisher. Hilarity!
 

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