A time of Romans

I guess we won’t be seeing the New Zealand library-troll around here again anytime soon.

Internet trolls face up to two years’ jail in New Zealand under a controversial new law which bans “harmful digital communications”. The law will help mitigate the harm caused by cyber-bullying and give victims a quick and effective means of redress, supporters said. Under the Harmful Digital Communications Act in effect from this week, anyone convicted of “causing harm by posting digital communication” faces two years in prison and a $50,000 (NZ) (£6,500) fine, while businesses face fines of up to $200,000. Harmful communications can include truthful as well as false information.

The Romans always win. In fairness to Phoenician, he had the sense to knock it off when I started going after Andrew Marston.

George Martin opposes the Tor boycott

George Rape Rape Martin takes time out of his daily fetish-writing to urge everyone  to oppose the Tor boycott, which is totally irrelevant and futile and doesn’t matter in the slightest, which is precisely why it must be denounced and opposed. It’s frankly a shame that he’s been distracted in this way, as old RapeSquared had been working on a smashing scene involving the violation of Arya Stark wearing the face of Cersei Lannister by two Sparrows, seven nuns, Ser Robert Strong, and King Tomas’s adopted kitten. It was really going to blow everyone’s socks off when West of Eros: The Epic Rapes of George R. R. Martin appears in 2017.

In one of the more recent developments, the Rabid Puppies and some of their allies and fellow travellers have declared a boycott of Tor Books. I say “Rabid” here because Beale is backing the boycott, while Larry Correia says the Sad Puppies are not boycotting anyone… though Correia and some of the other Sads certainly seem deeply sympathetic to the boycott.

I am not, needless to say. Neither is most of fandom.

Which makes this a perfect time to BUY SOME TOR BOOKS!!

So if you would like to strike a blow for free speech and decency, and support all the good people at Tor, go ye forth and buy a book today… from the Cocteau, or Amazon, or anywhere… and let your voice be heard.

[Martin adds in the comments:] “The Tor boycott is an ugly attempt to try and cost some good people their jobs. It needs to be denounced and opposed.”

Good people? On what planet can the likes of lying, libelous, Code of Conduct-violating individuals such as Irene Gallo and Patrick Nielsen Hayden be reasonably described as “good people”? Observably not this one. And as for the “free speech and decency” Martin claims to be defending, let’s recall the speech itself:

 “There are two extreme right-wing to neo-nazi groups, called the Sad
Puppies and the Rabid Puppies respectively, that are calling for the end
of social justice in science fiction and fantasy. They are
unrepentantly racist, sexist and homophobic. A noisy few but they’ve
been able to gather some Gamergate folks around them and elect a slate
of bad-to-reprehensible works on this year’s Hugo ballot.”
– Irene Gallo, Creative Director of Tor Books and Associate Publisher of Tor.com

That is a clear and undeniable violation on several counts of the Macmillan Code of Conduct. It is a completely unprovoked, absolutely unprofessional attack on Tor’s customers as well as several of Tor’s own authors. If Irene Gallo was a fry cook at McDonalds or a minimum-wage greeter at Walmart, she’d be gone already, and it is as disingenuous as it is stupid to pretend otherwise.

RapeSquared was promptly called on his little omissions by a few of his readers and didn’t hesitate to take some liberties with the facts. Because, after all, George Martin is an SJW, and SJWs always lie.

lordevaco
Jul. 7th, 2015 09:00 pm (UTC)
I just thought it was weird to leave out why there is a boycott in the first place, so I googled it. I didn’t even know about it, but apparently it’s because someone at Tor denounced all of them as “neo-Nazis” and “unrepentantly racist, misogynist, and homophobic” and Tor didn’t do anything about it.

That’s not cool at all either.

grrm
Jul. 7th, 2015 10:45 pm (UTC)
If you googled it, you should also have read that not one but TWO apologies were issued for that tweet, one by the person who posted it, one by the publisher of Tor. That should have closed the book on the affair. Instead we have a boycott and calls for firings.

And I have yet to see anyone on the Puppy side apologize for anything, though their name-calling has far exceeded that coming from the fans.

lumbridge
Jul. 8th, 2015 12:43 am (UTC)
Why are the sad puppies boycotting Tor books? By the way which fantasy titles would you recommend that Tor publishes?

grrm
Jul. 8th, 2015 01:27 am (UTC)
It’s the Rabid Puppies boycotting Tor, not the Sads. Plus some unaffiliated or semi-affiliated allies.

I will not attempt to explain the whole thing. In a nutshell, a Tor employee categorized the Puppies in a nasty way, some of them got outraged and demanded an apology, an apology was issued, but the Rabids decided that was not enough and now want resignations and firings. (Which they are never going to get, by the way).

We’ll see. Corporate actions tend to move along very slowly and then happen all at once. Macmillan’s CEO just returned from his sabbatical this week and I have been directly informed by a Macmillan executive that no decision on how to address the situation has yet been made. And while I suppose it is possible that Mr. Sargent could simply throw out the company Code of Conduct in order to retain the services of an arrogant, entitled employee who believes she can treat his company’s customers and authors with total contempt and still retain her job, I tend to doubt it.

I will not be even remotely surprised if both Ms Gallo and Mr. Nielsen Hayden leave Tor Books in the near future. Macmillan quite clearly had no idea what sort of inmate-run asylum it has on its hands, and it’s not surprising that it would take a little time for them to figure out what needs to be done in order to set it straight.

If it were my problem, I would clean house. After all, how many of the big SF/F franchises of the last 20 years has the biggest publisher in SF/F published? If one considers how hit SF/F franchises Tor Books has missed on, including Martin’s ASOIAF, it’s not as if their management team can considered irreplaceable. But it’s not my problem and not my decision. I’m simply not going to buy any Tor Books, not even those written by the excellent Mr. Wright, while Irene Gallo and Patrick Nielsen Hayden are still employed there.

Yes, polygamy is next

Remember when all the pro-homogamy SJWs claimed that it totally would NEVER lead to polygamy and you were a homophobic bigot if you expected that it would? Yeah, guess what. I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but they appear to have lied.

NOW that the dust is settling from the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized a right to same-sex marriage, there are new questions. In particular, could the decision presage a constitutional right to plural marriage? If there is no magic power in opposite sexes when it comes to marriage, is there any magic power in the number two?

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s dissent in Obergefell raised this very question, intending to show how radical the majority’s decision could become. But the issue was hard to discuss candidly while same-sex marriage was still pending, because both sides knew that association with plural marriage, a more unpopular cause, could have stymied progress for gay rights. (Opponents of same-sex marriage had reasons to emphasize the association, while supporters had reasons to play it down.) With same-sex marriage on the books, we can now ask whether polyamorous relationships should be next.

There is a very good argument that they should. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell did not focus primarily on the issue of sexual orientation. Instead, its main focus was on a “fundamental right to marry” — a right that he said could not be limited to rigid historical definitions or left to the legislative process. That right was about autonomy and fulfillment, about child rearing and the social order. By those lights, groups of adults who have profound polyamorous attachments and wish to build families and join the community have a strong claim to a right to marry.

And while Justice Kennedy’s opinion does not explicitly discuss this possibility, it is easy to see how future generations could read his language to include polyamory or plural marriage. Earlier court decisions about marriage, Justice Kennedy wrote, had “presumed a relationship involving opposite-sex partners,” but now we understand that the presumption was wrong. Similarly, while Justice Kennedy’s opinion repeatedly presumes that marriage involves two people, it is not hard to imagine another justice in 20 or 40 years saying that the assumption is similarly unenlightened.

I find it hard to get worked up about these things now that the die is so clearly cast. The civilizational foundations have already been sufficiently undermined, so all they’re quibbling about now is the exact shape that the wreckage will eventually take.

Don’t worry about the politics anymore. At this point, you should be preparing for the inevitable politics by other means that are on the way.

I used to wonder what the historians meant when they wrote that “all Europe was waiting for war” in the years leading up to WWI. Now, I finally get it. The good news, to the extent that one can consider it good news, is that the financial elite has proved they can kick a can that looked to be unkickable, so we should be able to make it to 2033 or thereabouts as I’ve repeatedly predicted.

C’est la même chose

I find it rather amusing that there are SJWs in science fiction who insist that I should not be on the shortlist for the Hugo Awards because there is NO PLACE in science fiction for any editor who believes female science fiction writers are different in any way, shape, or form than male science fiction writers.

“As a rule, women do not make good
scientifiction writers, because their education and general tendencies
on scientific matters are usually limited.”
– Hugo Gernsback

“Women do not write hard science fiction today because so few can hack
the physics, so they either write romance novels in space about strong,
beautiful, independent and intelligent but lonely women who finally fall
in love with rugged men who love them just as they are, or stick to
fantasy where they can make things up without getting hammered by
critics holding triple Ph.D.s in molecular engineering, astrophysics and
Chaucer.”
– Vox Day

In case the irony escapes you, the Hugo Awards are named for Mr. Gernsback, a science fiction editor who knew very well whereof he wrote. I very much doubt that the various excesses and absurdities of the Pink SF age would be any surprise to him.

Meanwhile, an actual female physicist adds:
“Instead of getting educated in science and writing harder sci-fi, women major in squishy subjects, write romance-in-space, and complain about how misogynistic it is to point out that women major in squishy subjects and write romance-in-space.”

It is apparent the Rabid Puppies have a battle cry: Hugo lo vult!

Puppypalooza!

Puppypalooza
6 PM Friday, July 10th
The Mean Eyed Cat
Austin, Texas

Booze and barbecue. All Rabid Puppies, Dread Ilk, Ilk, and Vile Faceless Minions welcome. VFM: don’t forget your number… and check your email tonight.

The historical Pink SF/Blue SF divide

At Castalia House, Morgan demonstrates that the divide has been around a lot longer than most of us realized, it’s just that the relative positions have been reversed thanks to the post-1980s gatekeepers:

A backlash against Conan began in the October 1933 issue. Sylvia Bennett of Detroit wrote in to say,

    “Will Robert E. Howard ever cease writing his infernal stories of ‘red battles’ and ‘fierce warfare’? I am becoming weary of his continuous butchery and slaughter. After I finish reading one of his gory stories I feel as if I am soaked with blood.”

Weird Tales contributor Jack Williamson, who would survive as one of the most long-lived writers from the pulp era, wrote to “The Eyrie” for the December 1933 issue defending “Black Colossus”:

    “I was rather surprised at the brickbat aimed by Miss Sylvia Bennett at Howard’s Black Colossus, which struck me as a splendid thing, darkly vivid, with a living primitive power.”

Sylvia Bennett would return to “The Eyrie” in the June 1934 issue:

    “Northwest Smith has become my idol in WEIRD TALES. Believe it or not, I’ve fallen passionately in love with him. There is a character for you! Warm, human, lovable and incredibly realistic. No barbarian baboon hot-head, this one, who slices off human and unhuman heads on the slightest pretext; nor snarls and growls at his girl-friends; nor socks his dames with such manly toughness as would make Clark Gable and Jimmy Cagney look like sissies in comparison. It is certain C. L. Moore is destined to become a popular Weird Tales author. Although Black Thirst did not reach the high standard of Shambleau, still it was an excellent job, weirdly and thrillingly beautiful.”

In other words, women have been trying to turn SF/F into romance novels long before Catherine Asaro or Stephanie Meyers were even born. The difference, of course, is that people didn’t pretend that what is essentially an SF/F-Romance hybrid was the True and Proper SF/F, much less give it awards claiming it to be best of breed.

However, notice the proto-SJW declaration of the inevitability of C.L. Moore’s success. Some things simply do not change.

Mailvox: Wallpaper request

Because the THERE WILL BE WAR covers by Lars – with a typology assist from JartStar and Chris – are awesome, we’ve had several requests for wallpapers based on them. So, without further ado, here they are at 1600×1000 resolution; just click on the smaller image to load the full one. I have to confess that while Vol. II is my favorite of the four anthologies we’ve released so far, Vol. IV is my favorite cover.

And, of course, you’ll no doubt want to pick up copies of the newly released Volume III and Volume IV too.

The EU doubles down

It’s not a huge surprise. They have never had any respect for democracy anyhow:

The European Central Bank has tightened liquidity conditions for the Greek banking system following the landslide victory for the Leftist government in Sunday’s referendum.

The central bank continued its freeze on emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) after Germany issued a humiliating ultimatum to Greece, warning that the country would be cast adrift and left to go bankrupt unless it agreed to much deeper concessions than anything offered so far.

Sigmar Gabriel, the German vice-chancellor, said the landslide rejection of EU austerity demands in the Greek referendum changed nothing, demanding that the Left-wing Syriza government must accept further belt-tightening without any prospect of debt relief if it wishes to remain in the eurozone.

“The final bankruptcy now appears imminent,” he said. The Greek leaders have been told that they have a deadline of Tuesday afternoon to come up with far-reaching proposals.

And before any morons pop up and start blathering about “those lazy Greeks should pay their debts”, understand that it is mathematically impossible for them to do so. Not difficult, not hard, impossible. It is never going to happen. And note that the IMF, which has been continuing to loan them money, has known this since 2011.

Keep in mind that the USA was actually more indebted than Greece until just a few years ago. The difference is that the USA can always print more credit dollars. The Greeks cannot, not until they get rid of the Euro and go back to the drachma. The core problem is not that the Greeks were profligate, although they were, but that they chose to join the EU and the Euro.

Don’t forget that wherever there are large sums of money involved, there is always quite a bit going on behind the scenes:

“the European Central Bank said it can’t release files showing how Greece may have used derivatives to hide its borrowings because disclosure could still inflame the crisis threatening the future of the single currency.”

Considering the crisis of the (not so) single currency is very much “inflamed” right now as it is about to be proven it was never “irreversible”, perhaps it is time for at least one aspiring, true journalist, unafraid of disturbing the status quo of wealthy oligarchs and central planners, to at least bring some closure to the Greek people as they are swept out of the Eurozone which has so greatly benefited the very same Goldman Sachs whose former lackey is currently deciding the immediate fate of over €100 billion in Greek savings.

Because something tells us the reason why Mario Draghi personally blocked Bloomberg’s FOIA into the circumstances surrounding Goldman’s structuring, and hiding, of Greek debt that allowed not only Goldman to receive a substantial fee on the transaction, but permitted Greece to enter the Eurozone when it should never have been allowed there in the first place, is that the person who oversaw and personally endorsed the perpetuation of the Greek lie is none other than Goldman’s Vice Chairman and Managing Director at Goldman Sachs International from 2002 to 2005. The man who is also now in charge of the ECB.

Mario Draghi.

There Will Be War Vols III and IV

Created by the bestselling SF novelist Jerry Pournelle, THERE WILL BE
WAR is a landmark science fiction anthology series that combines
top-notch military science fiction with factual essays by various
generals and military experts on everything from High Frontier and the
Strategic Defense Initiative to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It
features some of the greatest military science fiction ever published,
such Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in Volume I and Joel Rosenberg’s
“Cincinnatus” in Volume II. Many science fiction greats were featured in
the original nine-volume series, which ran from 1982 to 1990, including
Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Gordon Dickson, Poul
Anderson, Jack Vance, John Brunner, Gregory Benford, Robert Silverberg,
Harry Turtledove, and Ben Bova.

THERE WILL BE WAR Volume IIII is edited by Jerry Pournelle and John
F. Carr, and features 16 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular
note are “Hide and Seek” by Arthur C. Clarke, “The Spectre General” by
Theodore Cogswell, “The Myth of a Liberation” by Truong Nhu Tang, and
“Silent Leges” by Jerry Pournelle.

382 pages, no DRM. It is available at Amazon and Castalia House.

 THERE WILL BE WAR Volume IV is edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F.
Carr, and features 21 stories, articles, and poems. Of particular note
are “The Cloak and the Staff” by Gordon R. Dickson, “Interim Justice” by
William F. Wu, “Psyops” by Stefan Possony, and “No Truce with Kings” by
Poul Anderson.

378 pages, no DRM. It is available at Amazon and Castalia House.

An expert on overhyped failure

Sees similar problems on the horizon for Star Citizen:

The problem that RSI is now faced with is something that us vets all saw coming a mile away. This level of exposure, all the press, the promises, the hype, the glorious anti-establishment chanting and rhetoric etc.: all of it has a very bad downside.

And it’s not like the rumblings haven’t been there. Every time there is new press about a funding milestone or yet another ship concept cash grab, there is some derogatory rhetoric associated with it because most backers are fed up and just want the game they were promised back in 2012.

Others are just waiting for the day when it all comes crashing down, so they can point, chuckle, and say they saw it coming.

And last I checked, some people had spent over $5,000 on this game. Even if you don’t want to believe that, believe this: they’ve raised about $85 million from 918,806 backers. That is an average of $92 per gamer.

A couple of weeks ago last month, when there was news about the FTC going after failed promises made by someone who crowdfunded a game, there were various discussions about the terrible precedent which would be set if this game failed to deliver and if a bunch of people reported it. And that’s no joke. We’re talking $85 million. That’s a lot of cash. Other people’s money.

If you spend $30 and get a generic game, you’ll post a bad review, tell all your friends etc. Eventually, you will move on. It happens. But in this instance, given all what has transpired, and all this money, gamers aren’t going to let it slide. Even if they lost $19.

No; they’re going to ask WTF happened to “all that money?“ because now it’s their money, not some faceless investor’s, or even a publisher.

And they’re going to be pissed because they expected more than a hangar and a largely buggy Arena Commander module which isn’t representative of the game they were pitched back in 2012, and which has to have been delivered two years later in Nov 2014.

As I’ve said before, I want this game to succeed for a lot of selfish reasons, least of all being that I funded it. I mostly want it to succeed because we don’t have any games like this in the genre, and not even my games can fill that void because they are super complex, pretty old, don’t look as pretty etc. You know, different budgets, different production values etc. And I really don’t care who makes it. All I know is that before I die, I want to play it. Is that too much to ask?

I also want it to succeed in whatever form because if it doesn’t,
it’s going to be another massive gamedev and videogame crowdfunding
black eye. I know people who are already rumbling that if this fails
that it is going to be more epic than the collapse of 38 Studios in the Summer of 2012. And that $75 million was mostly tax-payer money.  And almost three years now, that one is still playing out in the courts.

What I mean by this comparison is related to the following, all of
which happened to 38 Studios, it’s creators, primary execs, politicians
etc. and how the media handled it:

  • The amount of public money raised is not something to ignore. Like
    that studio’s sudden implosion in 2012, it’s a lot of money. The kind of
    money that makes every lawyer, politician, analyst etc., perk up their
    ears and try to get involved in the fray.
  • Given the number of studios working on this project worldwide, the
    sudden loss of jobs would be catastrophic for some people, most of whom
    had to relocate to get their jobs.
  • The hype surrounding this project since its 2012 inception is going
    to guarantee that every media outlet is going to want a piece of the
    action, and most of that is going to be based on sheer speculation,
    wanton conjecture, bullshit anonymous “sources” etc., because the focus
    would be on vilifying Chris and crew, rather than focusing on what
    mistakes were made.

And I need not even mention APB as another example.

To add to the noise, there are reports that people (Travis Day, a
senior producer left recently) at RSI have been leaving, the executive
producer (!) (UPDATE. It has been confirmed to me that Alex Mayberry, the Exec Producer, hired a year ago, is no longer at the company) is on his way out, and they’re spending more than they’re bringing in because crowdfunding has peaked etc.

The understated economics of game development is quite simple. For as
long as I’ve been around, and seen so many projects fail because they
ran out of funds, you’d think that by now this is something every
developer and publisher would be aware of, and plan for it:

  • If you’re spending $2 and bringing in $1, you’re in trouble.
  • If your studio is burning through $2 million a month, then you need
    $24 million a year in funding. If you’re selling less than $2 million a
    month, you’re in trouble.
  • If your studio has $24 million to make a game over a period of two
    years, and you’re burning more than $1 million per month, you’re in
    trouble.
  • If your budget is down to the wire, in that you don’t have a buffer
    of at least 15% of your funds in reserve, and which you can use for
    unforeseen expenses during development, you’re asking for trouble.

None of the departures, delays etc. should necessarily be regarded as
a sign of trouble for the project. When you start to scale back or
hunker down, people leaving, delays, stuff getting cut etc. is all par
for the course. What you can expect though, for something of this scope,
is that it’s going to get scaled back. That’s assuming that it ever
sees the light of day.

And if they scale it back, that’s going back on promises. And when
that happens, it’s going to be a complete disaster. Guaranteed.

So to those of you who don’t know how this works, it doesn’t make any
sense to scream “failure” when you have no clue just what (a lot) goes into developing these games.

It may succeed, it may fail; but for now, all we can do is watch how it plays out. But given the fiasco surrounding Freelancer—the
other very ambitious game that Chris tried to make, and the
disappointment that was the final game as delivered versus what was
promised, after which Chris left the industry—we should all be worried.
Especially this time around, there’s no Electronic Arts and no Microsoft
to act as a tether, or for us to point the finger at and to hold
accountable.

For me, I already know—for a fact—that they can’t build this game they’ve pitched, and which I was looking forward to someone making.

I’m concerned about this one too. I had a number of extensive conversations with Chris about this back when he had permission to use the Wing Commander license for it – we even discussed the possibility of using one of my AI designs for the wingmen – and I would really, really, really like to see it be successful too. Wing Commander is one of my all-time favorite games and I have very fond memories of it and of the man himself.

But the potential problem, as I see it, is that RSI got distracted by the unexpected level of success of their fund-raising efforts, and like many a charity before them, lost sight of their primary objective due to that success. This is understandable, of course, because fund-raising for a game this size is an absolute bitch for an independent, even one as well-regarded as Chris is. It takes an incredible amount of time and nineteen out of every twenty alleys eventually lead to a brick wall.

The positive side of limited resources is that it forces you to make the hard choices, you simply have no other option because you can’t do everything. I thought it was fantastic that Star Citizen managed to raise even more money than they were looking for to do Wing Commander, thinking that this was the dawn of a new funding model, but ironically enough, the very success of Star Citizen may lead to it being deemed a failure even if Chris manages to produce what would have been a very successful version of the $20 million project he originally envisioned, if it takes him $85 million to do it no one is going to be happy.

Because, as Derek Smart observes, everyone’s expectations have been raised. If it’s not the greatest game ever, if it doesn’t blow people away the way the original Wing Commander and Grand Theft Auto 5 did, it could end up having a crushing effect on game-related crowdfunding in the future.

For those of you who are too young, or too unfamiliar with the game industry, Battlecruiser 3000 AD was one of the most anticipated games of its day, but Derek never managed to deliver on its considerable promise, it had zero chance of ever living up to all the hype, and it is still, somewhat unfairly considering its relatively modest budget, (it’s rather shocking to discover that the budget was less than $650k) considered to be one of the great flops of the industry.

That being said, Derek is a smart guy and he would know about something being overhyped and unable to deliver on that hype.