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.

Minion Paul, queueing up It Came From Beneath the Sea: I was telling Anna, this is the movie where the monster’s an octopus, but they could only show four tentacles, since that’s all they could afford on their budget.
Minion Anna: So it’s more like a quadro-pus?
Solarbird: I thought a quadropus was just called a cat.

Check out this monstrosity of a 1980s synth:

No wait, that picture is missing the speakers, this will make what’s going on more clear:

Yes, it’s a synth with a built-in boombox. Or a synth built into a boombox, or a boombox with a built-in synth. It’s the legendarily goofy Casio KX-101, and I had never heard it it before Torsten Adair pointed it out to me on Facebook a couple of days ago.

You can play along with the radio, or with cassette playback, I think. You can’t record your music to that cassette, though – the synth uses it as a datacassette.

Like this, only DM1200. YES THIS THING COST LIKE 1200 DEUTSCHEMARKS.

Why a datacassette? So you could store your sequences, of course. YES YOU READ THAT RIGHT IT IS ALSO A SEQUENCER. Why, gods, why?

ALSO FOR SOME REASON IT WILL PLAY YOUR CASSETTE TAPES IN RANDOM ORDER IF YOU WANT. Yay let’s randomise the setlist! Nothin’ says “pro concert experience” like each song being separated by 60-something seconds of tape-seeking noise as it randomly picks and seeks to another spot on the cassette, am I right or am I right?

Synthtopia has a 2009 article on this monstrosity. Here’s a video:

You’re… welcome?

In 2016, I pledge to rule the Fire Nation with an IRON FIST. It’s what Azula would’ve wanted.

I’ve seen a lot of people talk about 2015 as a terrible, just-survive-it kind of year, and hoping next year will be better.

For us, 2015 has been a pretty good year, and not just because nobody had to overnight at the hospital. No, it wasn’t all great; some things were pretty terrible, and I could dwell on them, and would, given half a chance. It’s in a supervillain’s nature, I think. But I’d rather start 2016 concentrating on what’s gone right.

So, in that spirit – what’s gone well for you in 2015? What’s gone right?

Here’s my list. Taking it month by month:

• January: After all those delays, Bone Walker shipped, with a big release show at Conflikt;
• February: BASSMAS! Plus, I could announce announce my first GoH (Toastmaster) invitation;
• March: Legend of Korra fandom had the best possible ECCC fan meetup photo;
• March and April both: The Sad Puppies mess was terrible, fair enough, but I won’t turn down the traffic from the articles I wrote;
• May: it turned out that having a proper mobile view really matters on the blog;
• June: Playing concerts in 119°F weather was terrible, but we got good stories out of it;
• July: the Seattle Peoples’ Front struck again with great success;
• August: the Spokane Worldcon came and went with some degree of hilarity, and then, of course;
• September: we got nominated to the Grammy jury, and, to our astonishment…
• October: …past that jury and to the Long List, making us officially nominees. Then I made Regional Sales Director at Vault-Tec;
• November: …and went to Orycon for the first time in so long it was really my first Orycon again. Then we topped off…
• December: …by recording a new single (can’t link yet, sorry), and making our first guest appearance in someone else’s music video.

So for us, on balance? A good year.

Your turn. What’s gone well for you in 2015? Go!

Genuinely the last call: Use cyber2015 at checkout before midnight, December 31st, for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album.

Today and tomorrow are the last days that the “cyber2015” code will work at checkout. It’s for 20% off everything on our Bandcamp site – not just Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album, but everything, including the Free Court of Seattle books, Faerie Blood and Bone Walker. Plus everything else on the merch page.

plus other stuff too

Also, I’ve just handed off the single to Conflikt. I wish I could just throw this out at you now, but I can’t, it’s a 2016 release and I did it for them, so I have to be good and have to wait. Which is really hard, because I’m not good at that. I MADE SHINY, LOOK AT IT!!!1! is just too much of my nature, I admit it.

ngngngngngngngh oh well. I guess I’ll just go bury myself in some other project. (but shiny!)

Found this in our webserver logs, from a CCC IP address:

(We’re far from the only one, it’s going around…)

Just got climate control back up and running at the Lair – we’ve been on auxiliary for the last few days, which isn’t such a big deal – but it is extra work.

The problem turned out to be a failed starter capacitor for the blower system. Best case, really; trivial fix. But it means the problem, quite literally, was that this unit had a bad motivator, which – as we all know – is pretty much the only thing that ever fails ever in the entire Star Wars tech universe.

fffffffft

So… does this mean I’m going to have stormtroopers breathing down my neck now?

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album.

Finished up the single, “Thirteen,” for Conflikt; I’ve got a release candidate sitting on the hard drive, just need to run it by a couple of listeners to make sure I’ve not done something foolish I haven’t noticed.

It’s pretty crunchy, which is lots of fun. Not much overdrive on the octave mandolin, but that’s because it didn’t need any – it sounds all trashed out already. ♥

It’s also the first time I’ve recorded anything on the Godin A5 fretless bass. I’m doing very little fretless-specific playing (not zero, but very little), but I’m certainly spending a lot of time hanging out on the low fifth string. Subwoofers will have things to do. n/

I also experimented with a new technique, recording both a clean bass take and a take through a couple of really cool efx pedals and an amp that clearly wants to be making cookie monster metal, then mixing together. That was awesome.

I think I felt like making a statement here. I’m really proud of Bone Walker, but elfmetal it ain’t, particularly not in the “metal” category. This is kind of resetting that pointer a bit. Recalibrating.

I’d like to link you to the track, but I can’t, because first, it’s still an RC, not a released track, and second, it’s going to premiere at Conflikt, so they get it first, and third, I kind of have to ask permission from the person whose song I’m covering (with new lyrics) here – I got permission to use it for Conflikt, but not to put it up as a free download after. I just didn’t think about it. But I think they’ll say okay, I just have to ask first.

Now to see if I can get “We’re Not Friends” to come together in time for rehearsals. I sure hope so, it’s got a hell of a lot of good parts!

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album.

As I said yesterday – machete order doesn’t help the prequels. It really doesn’t.

But it does help Return of the Jedi. I’m really surprised by that. If you manage to make it through Revenge of the Sith, if you manage to get to that moment where suddenly these actually are people, making terrible mistakes with terrible consequences, the whole Luke/Vader/Emperor conflict both makes more actual sense and finally – finally! – has emotional resonance.

Bear with me for a minute here, because oh yeah, I’m going to explain this.

First, the smaller point: Luke is right. I don’t mean about Vader/Anakin, leave that aside for a minute. I’m talking about Palpatine.

“Your overconfidence is your weakness,” Luke says, when he’s presented to the Emperor. Without knowing how we got here – without knowing how Vader got here – that doesn’t have a lot of impact. It’s a throwaway line, a bluff.

But we know how carefully Palpatine groomed Anakin, and how deep his plans ran at even the last critical moment in Anakin’s conversion, and how calculating Palpatine was. Leave aside what of it does and doesn’t make sense in the real world – last time, he was being careful. By Star Wars standards, he was being delicate, and deft. He can be; he has been; we’ve seen it.

Now, in Jedi, he thinks he doesn’t have to be. He can bash Luke about the head with blunt force mocking and goading. Frankly, it’s sloppy, and you really don’t see how it can be effective if Luke has any actual choice in the matter at all.

In other words, the Emperor is monumentally overconfident. He’s completely sure in his power, and convinced of the idea that Luke has no actual choice. If he’s right, he doesn’t need to do anything more; he can, in fact, rub Luke’s face in it, which is exactly what he’s doing.

It now, at last, makes sense. His overconfidence really is his weakness.

Second, the larger point: Anakin was a douchebag. But while Anakin the Douchebag was a jackass with delusions of grandeur – delusions those arrogant pricks the Jedi of the Republic fostered, I might add – he wasn’t evil. He demanded things he hadn’t earned, he was far too interested in power, we put up with his whinging and complaining and and and and and and all of these are qualities not of an abstraction, but of a person.

And in Sith, at least, you buy into that person as real.

So now we know who Luke is trying to talk to. We know there’s somebody in there who fucked up, and fucked up bad, and knows it. (And that that last is pretty much text from Jedi – “it is too late, for me.”) We’ve met the person Luke is convinced still hides somewhere inside the breathy monolith which is Darth Vader. We know who he was and how he got there, and we know that he didn’t like it.

So when Luke steps up to the same precipice that Anakin stepped up to all those years before, and we see him step back where Anakin fell, it means more than it did as a solo act. We saw his father fail; we see Luke succeed.

And that’s all fine and good, and already means more than it did, but that’s not all we see. We also see Luke reach down and pull Anakin back. Luke pulls Anakin out of Darth, and he’s fully there, for the first time in decades.

And the thing is, it’s not to redemption. It’s not that simple. Darth/Anakin is also right, when he says it is too late for him. He can’t undo all the horrors he helped create. He can’t wipe that slate clean, force ghost or no force ghost, I say.

But Anakin can make a second decision. He can’t undo his crimes, but he can sacrifice himself – his power, his life – to keep it all from happening again, to someone else. He can’t save himself, perhaps, but Luke aside, there is another, and now that matters, because even if Luke dies unfallen, Leia is next.

And Anakin can stop it.

That realisation – not the Emperor’s lazy, juvenile taunting – is what pushed Luke to the edge of the precipice; it’s also what pulled Anakin back up towards it, to where Luke could grab him, and pull him, impossibly, back over, back out of the dark. Not to undo the horrors he’s committed, but to stop them from happening again.

And none of that complexity is there without the backstory, particularly as presented in the machete order. At the end of Empire, Darth Vader is as scary a creature as he’s ever going to be. Without knowing how we got here, we have to take Luke at his word and hope he’s right, and when he doesn’t step into that chasm, it seems the obvious choice, and the Emperor’s attempts to “convert” him seem… frankly silly. Anakin’s restoration seems shallow. Only the menace of Darth Vader carried those scenes – before.

But now we see that there’s a lot more going on. That missing chunk of context – or that added chunk of backstory, as you feel you prefer – changes the film, far more so than any of Lucas’s clumsy Special Edition horseshit.

With all that new knowledge, that machete order knowledge, the crux of Return of the Jedi no longer feels empty. It’s now solid, it now bears weight – at long last, it has emotional import. There are actual stakes, there is actual dramatic risk, and because of that, you can actually care.

And that’s something I think everyone agrees was kind of difficult the first time around.

I can’t think of many cases where a terrible film and a… pretty mediocre film with flashes of quality, I suppose… made an already decent film meaningfully better. I can certainly think of the opposite. But that’s the situation we have here. The machete order really, really throws it all in front of you, in ways the official order wouldn’t. It’s a rough third course, it really is – but the finish is so much better for it.

So I guess I can’t really believe I’m saying this, but… if you like the original trilogy… you really should watch the prequels. Or, at least, two of the three, specifically in the Machete order. Because what really gets redeemed by all this nonsense isn’t Anakin, or the Republic, or even any of that whole fictional universe…

What’s redeemed, at long last, is Return of the Jedi – a film which finally, years later, no longer has any apologies to make.

Use cyber2015 at checkout for 20% off all music, including Bone Walker, the long-list Grammy Award nominated album.