We’re up but will probably lose power again this afternoon. Backup sharable post here.

Last night, Donald Trump, Jr., retweeted white supremacist and pro-rape misogynist Vox Day. They are attempting to assert that the “heil” Trumpist photographed outside Mr. Trump’s aborted Chicago rally last night was a Bernie Sanders plant.

However, as is almost always the case, Vox was wrong. The woman he labelled as being the plant is in fact a Bernie Sanders activist, but she was at a different event in another city (and state!) at the time, and there are plenty of photos. One of them is at her tweet:

https://twitter.com/PortiaABoulger/status/708681685378981888

Vox Day is best known in fannish circles for leading the “Rabid Puppies” movement to rig the Hugo Awards last year. He is also a noted anti-semite, misogynist, rape supporter, racist, and self-described reactionary. A collection of some of his commentary may be found here, and a series of We Hunted the Mammoth articles may be found here.

Okay, so I was looking at the photos of the natural gas explosion in Greenwood that destroyed at least three businesses and two buildings, and The Angry Beaver (right across the street) didn’t look too badly beat up – like, I saw a photo of the front windows being shattered but still in place, and I figured “okay, not as bad as all that, clean up and board up and open for business.” But here’s this, from /r/Seattle:

My boyfriend owns the bar directly across the street (Angry Beaver). We were closing down when the explosion happened. We thought ‘terrorist attack’ and all four of us ran out the back door. I think we are lucky to be alive. All of our windows blew out, bottles flew off the shelves, the ceiling blew out, stuff in the kitchen exploded. Our bar is destroyed. I don’t know how we came out alive, but not a single one of us was hurt. I don’t know what the fallout will be tomorrow, but we have our staff and regulars at our house right now drinking whiskey. We took pictures of the damages. I feel sorry for our insurance.

Hey, yeah, apparently WORSE THAN IT LOOKED. The Seattle Quebecois and Newfoundland trad communities might want to jump in here maybe? I have no idea how, or even how to get that ball rolling, though. Supervillain fundraisers tend to be some variant of “hold the world hostage by taking over the moon,” which isn’t real applicable here.

Everybody pass the word along, so at least everybody knows?

eta: Here’s the Beaver’s ‘closed for now’ post.

eta2: Here are multiple confirmed aid pages for the businesses destroyed or damaged in the explosion.

I’ve posted about the effort to save KPLU as an independent Puget Sound radio station – with independent and good local journalism – a few times now. Pacific Lutheran University is selling the station, and right now, KUOW is the buyer, with intent to shut down their news and local programming and make it a full-time jazz outlet.

If KUOW’s direction of the last two years is any indication, the resulting station will basically be a syndicated-NPR-jazz feed with no local programming of note, and certainly no meaningful local news coverage. Since the new DC-based programme director took over, KUOW has become a wasteland of national syndication and corporatism. I’ve stopped my support.

So now is a very good time to pledge and keep that from happening, because they have a $200,000 matching grant, which means that all donations right now are doubled. It works like a Kickstarter, in that pledges are held pending meeting the goal. So go to their support page now and throw money – every dollar will be doubled for the next week. And thanks.

What the hell, fandom? I mean, I know, everybody is terrible lately, but c’mon.

Mark Does Stuff went public with the abuse and harassment he faced as FanGoH(!) at ConQuesT. Jesi Pershing, who resigned from the concom over their refusal to act, adds her account here.

MidAmeriCon II, despite being a separate convention, is clearly feeling some blowback and trying to get ahead of this right now. I hope they mean it. Rachael Caine has made a statement about being fed up with this bullshit.

Meanwhile, Rainfurrest is down, perhaps for the long term, due to misbehaviour including significant hotel damage and actionable assault. That’s quite the writeup. They did not get ahead of things, and it’s taken them down. Which is why it’s probably good that Katsucon is taking immediate action in response to similar bullshit happening at their event this year.

In short, TAKE SOME GODDAMN NOTES, PEOPLE – get ahead of this or go down. I like our shiny conventions. Stop wrecking them.

eta: File 770 now has a post up about it too, with a big comment thread.

Am I actually getting visits (and some plays) from users on Baidu, or is this just some sort of confusing player behaviour? Because all these are Bandcamp stats and they super-vague.

I’d assume it’s just odd behaviour but it’s all very recent and Baidu isn’t exactly new. Anyway, hello China? Maybe? ^_^

Okay, so Battlestar Galactica, right? The excellent reboot which was a remake of the Glen Larson 1970s better-than-first-impression demi-classic. Mormonism plus Ancient Astronauts = Space Apocalypse and/or Space Adventures, depending.

I’ve never really studied how far back that whole Ancient Astronauts bullshit goes, because I have better things to do with my life, but I stumbled across something today. Could this bit of I-can-see-how-you-get-there-but-wow nuttiness from the March 1961 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact be the starting point?

The article is called “The Four-Faced Visitors of Ezekiel,” and its thesis is that they were not so much angels as space travellers, misinterpreted. Only it’s not really billed as fiction, it’s more of a “what if?” kind of piece.

Searching around for more about the “Ezekiel” author, I found this blog post from a “UFO Investigator” which talks about how you can draw a straight line from Jack Kirby’s comic book character, “Metron,” to this very article in Analog. Halperin asserts Metron is Metatron – which I think we all have to agree is the most Kirby name ever invented for an angel, but that’s beside the point – with the serial numbers filed off, and points at the similarities in drawings between the article and the comics.

So – Analog Science Fiction and Fact (1961) to Jack Kirby’s Metron (1971) to Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods (who even cares get out of here you hack) to Glen A. Larson’s Battlestar Galactica (1978) and BSG (2007)? Is this a thing?

And if so, does Neon Genesis Evangelion belong in here too?

I don’t even know.

Up late playing with a spider capo, a capo that lets you capo strings on a per-string basis. It’s fun. I have found an E-heavy partial-capo configuration (yes E again I am into E lately do not mock me) that I am really enjoying.

The only downside so far is that I know a couple of my frets need replacing because they’re worn down, and it hasn’t been a big deal in normal playing yet, but it’s a much bigger deal when using the spider. “beautiful dreamy sounds hypnotising my test subjects” “aw yea Esus2 is my mind control jam” [SUDDEN BEE NOISE] GODDAMMIT FRET WEAR WHY DO YOU HATE ME?!

I don’t think I should really need to replace frets so often. Every couple of years just seems excessive, but idk, maybe that’s normal? I just hate losing the zouk while it’s being worked on, particularly since I don’t exactly have a second one. Sometimes I think I should be talking about that with a luthier – I mean, it’s not like production zouks are thick on the ground, I mean, I know of two and I have the better one, so if I want to do something about that, I’ll have to.

But that way lies guitar collector madness and also did I mention the necessary dump trucks full of money? No? Well, that’s how that works.

stupid dump trucks. stupid money.

We’ve had to disable greylisting on our mail server, because ever since the latest round of security updates we loaded over the weekend, every dkim-using host in the world fails key retrieval at milter-greylist, and we don’t get mail from google or twitter or yahoo or much of anybody large anymore.

And there’s no way to just disable dkim check in milter-greylist.

Anybody have any idea what the fuck might have happened? Searching online finds me exactly nothing. Here’s a sample – every transaction involving DKIM-signed mail fails, every time, and it started at the weekend round of security patches:

Jan 25 23:31:25 newmoon sm-mta[978]: u0Q7VOMi000978: from=<ZZZZZZZZ@gmail.com>, size=2334, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<CAAsYJfyDCB0w3uKXjie-uXF_Xskt524MuKU4=HHckYMkeDKZQg@mail.gmail.com>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=mail-pf0-f179.google.com [209.85.192.179]
Jan 25 23:31:25 newmoon milter-greylist: DKIM failed: Key retrieval failed
Jan 25 23:31:25 newmoon sm-mta[978]: u0Q7VOMi000978: Milter: data, reject=451 4.3.2 Please try again later
Jan 25 23:31:25 newmoon sm-mta[978]: u0Q7VOMi000978: to=<YYYYYYYY@murkworks.net>, delay=00:00:00, pri=32334, stat=Please try again later

I’m going to take a minute to step entirely out of character and write about something local – the effort to save KPLU, a highly popular non-profit radio station.

.

KPLU has been owned by Pacific Lutheran University since its founding. It’s a jazz and news station, with very good local coverage – something sadly lacking in mass media. However, the university decided to sell it; they see radio as a declining-value asset, and the school needs the cash. But they negotiated this deal in secret; the first hint that they had any interest in selling was an announcement that they’d reached a deal with KUOW and the University of Washington.

Now, once upon a time, KUOW – UW’s NPR outlet – was a decent station. Not the best, but not the worst, and I was a regular donor. That time is long past. They have virtually no local programming or news anymore; I stopped listening to them because since they hired their new east-coast programming director and station manager, they sound like an NPR corporate station operating out of Washington, DC, not a UW station operating out of Washington State. And, all too predictably, they immediately announced their intent to fold KPLU into their broadcast network as an all-jazz second station, eliminating KPLU’s very good independent local news and information bureau.

We are already suffering – as are most of the US-controlled territories – with a near-collapse in anything that can be seriously called journalism. In-depth coverage is all but absent, and local coverage in particular loses out. Media consolidation sucks.

For all of these reasons, a large local movement arose to demand that KPLU be given the chance to buy itself out, and go independent. You see, despite what PLU likes to say, KPLU is entirely self-supporting now. It just had a record fundraising drive during the secret sellout negotiations. Its listenership is quite large. Its citizen advisory board demanded to know why they’d been kept out of the process, once it was announced, and asserted immediately that the sale was deeply inappropriate.

So, following massive protest – well, massive, given the scale of non-profit radio – we’ve been given a shot. It was begrudgingly given; KUOW really wants to own KPLU’s transmitters. But it was given, so we have a chance.

We have six months; they need seven million dollars. I’ve already pledged. If you’re interested at all in supporting Puget Sound news coverage, I hope you will too.

Click here to help save KPLU.

The Puppies made another attempt to game a system last week, but it fell apart rather hilariously.

The first notice it got was a lot of very negative commentary all at once on a negative review of one of the oberpuppyführer Vox Day’s collections; Lis Carey left a note about it in File 770‘s comments section. And File 770 also found a post about it on Vox’s blog. (Linked via DoNotLink).

Well, it gets dumber from there. Sean O’Hara started poking around, and found that there was a Secret Puppy Goodreads Group*, formed with the explicit intention of gaming the site by bombing “SJW” reviewers and authors with negative reviews and ratings, and uprating all Puppy-affiliated works. The problem is, while it was a limited-access group – well, I’ll hand it to Sean:

Too bad for him the only thing keeping out the SJWs was a challenge question that could be answered with a simple Google search. By Saturday night I had access to the group. I didn’t know what to do — undermine him from the inside, play Serpico and leak screenshots on a piecemeal basis, or save them up for a big reveal. The last one seemed the best way not to get caught until I had a good collection of dirt, and I was strongly leaning in that direction.

But after reading File770’s news roundup yesterday, which included a story about someone being ganged up on by Day and his goons, I decided it might be better to give warning where I could.

Here are a collection of screenshots from that group.

And apparently, while Goodreads is a bit of a mess sometimes, that was simply too much for them, and they banned the whole lot of them, with Vox himself being singled out for permanent lockout.

Vox has, of course, claimed victory. (Also a DoNotLink link.)

It’s kind of sad at this point, really. The problem is that the crazy neighbour is only so funny, because sooner or later, they might just bring in a bunch of friends from out of state and take over a wildlife refuge centre, and then it’s not so much fun anymore.

And since we’re talking Puppies, I might as well point at this takedown by Scott Lynch of John C. Wright’s accusations against Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Worldcon, supported by all witnesses who aren’t John C. Wright. I don’t think anyone outside the reactionary rightist circle has a lot of fucks go give about Mr. Wright – remember, this is the guy who came to my blog threatening to sue me for libel after I quoted him accurately and in context. That’s the kind of reality-disassociated sad muppet he is. But I saw his new post, “Stormbunnies and Crybullies”, responding (quite negatively) to George R. R. Martin’s recent call for winding down this fanwar, and one paragraph stood out:

But I am a forgiving man, jovial and magnanimous. I make the following peace offer: Go your way. Cease to interfere with me and my livelihood, do your work, cease to libel me and meddle with my affairs, withhold your tongue from venom and your works from wickedness, and we shall all get along famously.

Emphasis added.

Don’t write what I don’t like, and we’ll get on fine.

I’m the kind of person he doesn’t want to exist. I’m several kinds of people he doesn’t want to see being written about. (You might recall John as the person who so passionately hated Korra from The Legend of Korra, explicitly and specifically because she’s bi. He’s one of those hate-the-sin love-the-sinners whose idea of “love” is making people like me illegal.)

So if we all just stop writing about uppity women and those horrible queers and faggots – all of whom, as you’ll recall, should be beaten to death with ax-handles and tire irons – we’ll get along just fine.

The only ‘peace’ these guys can imagine is complete and utter submission to them. No wonder they have such a fascination with ISIL and the like; it’s a mirror. So do everything by their rules, on their terms, all the time, and always, always give them exactly what they want and do nothing else, and we’ll be just fine.

Stalin would be proud.

I was thinking about pasting in one of the stop liking what I don’t like memes as an ending for this post, but that doesn’t really work, because that’s just about childish frustration and confusion. This, by contrast, is childish frustration and confusion pupated into man-child quasi-fascism, and I don’t have a properly-fitting caption.

But I might have a good animated gif.

Even Kylo Ren is a more complex character than any of these people.

And I just don’t know where to go with that.

*: eta: The original post is missing. I don’t know why. This was the original link: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/9683209-you-all-owe-me and here is a still-valid Google cache as of 2016/01/05 21:45 Cascadian Standard Time (cache no longer valid).

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