Tag: freakshow

Your album covers totally lied

And so did your porn. It turns out lesbians aren’t hot. Not even a little bit. They’re just fat.

The US government has spent nearly $3 million on a study to explore lesbian obesity. According to the Department of Health and Human Services 69 per cent of American adults over the age of 20 are classified as overweight or obese and yet 75 per cent of America’s lesbian population falls into this category compared to half of the female population.

It’s hilarious to see the shambling lesbian land whales react to the obvious conclusion:

“Lets be absolutely clear. Lesbians are not gay because they can’t get a man.
All of the lesbians I know, and I know quite a few, have had to fight off
the attentions of men frequently. Studies like this only serve to give
ammunition to this type of prejudice.”

Sure, Pete Rose, whatever you say.

Old Age: Boomers suffer most

I am morally opposed to euthanasia, but sometimes, the bloody Baby Boomers really make it a terribly tempting proposition. Now they have discovered that they are the first generation in human history to grow old:

Every generation gets old, but for those who were told we’d be forever young, it just seems more painful. “It’s a huge issue,” says Dr. Anna Fels, a psychiatrist in New York. “I see so many who are trying to adjust their lives to this new phase, which for some reason none of us really pictured ourselves going through.”

Why didn’t we? We knew that eventually more people around us would be younger rather than older. But it still rankles. The image of a room filled with younger people is the perfect symbol.

“It’s an important marker for this generation because it reminds them that they are now the ones closest to obsolescence, the ones the world can do without,” says Dr. Roger Gould, a psychiatrist and the author of “Transformations,” a book about age-related adult problems.

Yes, the world can certainly do without them. In fact, the world would have been a good deal better off without their generational peculiarities. A fair amount of the blood that will be shed by our children and our grandchildren is going to be on their hands. They never pictured themselves going through what EVERY PREVIOUS HUMAN GENERATION HAD for the obvious reason that they are, collectively speaking, idiots.

The pathetic thing is that they are STILL trying to be cool. “When I was asked in a sociology class what music I listened to, I
hesitantly named Sam Cooke, thinking I would be stared at with stumped
pity. In fact, many voices shouted out, “Love Sam Cooke!””

Sure they did. I’m sure vast quantities of college students in 2014 listen to an now-obscure soul singer who died 50 years ago. Why, it’s amazing, but even the younger generations think you’re the epitome of a hep cat with a bad hip, Granddaddy-O! These narcissistic buffoons can’t even grow old and die with any grace. They’ll be sitting in hospital beds drooling on themselves, hooked up to machines, and if you lean in, put your ear up to their lips, and listen closely, you’ll be able to hear them whisper important words of the life-affirming wisdom they have acquired over the course of their long lives: “Eighty is the new twenty! Hospices are totally happening places these days!”

A female dev on the Quinn debacle

Gabriela Knight points out that the actual bias in the petty game development scene is very different than the anti-female one highlighted by the SJWs who have infiltrated the independent games media and are trying to save the near-nonexistent career of alleged indie games whore Zoe Quinn (or, apparently, Chelsea van Valkenburg):

 I’m a female indie dev. I’ve done art on about half a dozen games, one
of which was moderately successful. I’ve had varying degrees of
interaction with the journalists and developers involved in the latest
controversy du jour, as well as many others who are part of this culture
in ways that have not been publicized but are far more insidious than
Zoe Quinn sleeping with people for publicity. I was raised religious and
hold fairly conservative views politically (I feel I should declare my
biases ahead of time). This is as much personal detail as I am willing
to share. I wish I had the kind of courage to speak openly about this as
a few others have dared to, but I simply don’t…

Despite (or rather because of) all of the pontificating by left-leaning social justice types in the game industry about oppression, the easiest way for talentless hacks to break into the indie gaming industry is to associate with the sort of hipster liberal types that are getting all the publicity for their oppression. And worse yet, they get in over people with actual skills. I had a friend in college who was an amazing 3d modeler trying to break into the industry. She was turned down repeatedly and had to settle at a shitty mobile game company making cow clickers that no one cared about. Meanwhile Zoe Quinn is able to get hired by Loveshack solely because of who she knows (and sleeps with). But this isn’t about Zoe, her scandal is just a microcosm of the widespread corruption and nepotism in this industry. Another example is when the IGF allowed Fez to re-enter the competition (even though it had been there before) just because of Phil Fish’s connections to the festival organizers. These are not isolated incidents, and one need only look at the unprofessional interactions between journalists and devs on social media, at cons, and elsewhere to see that any semblance of professional barriers between these people don’t exist. It’s already apparent from their interactions that they form a very strong clique.

To be part of this scene while holding the religious and political views that I do is very difficult. I generally keep it close to my chest because the few times I’ve said even simple things like “I can’t make it to the thing on Sunday because I’m going to church” had led to all sorts of derision and mockery by other people in the industry. I shudder to imagine the blowback from their clique if I told them about how I voted yes on Prop 8. Just look at the way Doug TenNapel’s Kickstarter was lambasted by people in the industry (led by Ben Kuchera) because he dared to have a (non-liberal) political opinion. The creator of Earthworm Jim was only barely able to reach his Kickstarter goal, which was relatively modest compared to most of the others I’ve seen. This is just one example of how only those who toe the social justice line are allowed by the press and the devs’ clique. Even those who just try to keep quiet and uninvolved are often called out for not doing enough, or being a poor “ally.” To succeed in this industry you have to meet the standards of this clique, when it should be about meeting the standards of gamers. But when it’s impossible to get any publicity or work without meeting the standards of these self-fellating sycophants, that’s near impossible.

Women And Gaming

Let’s be completely honest: most women don’t play Quake III. Most of those few women like me who actually like first person shooters, grand strategy, space sims, and all those other genres that make up “core” gaming don’t care if they can play as a female protagonist, or if the girls are wearing skimpy outfits, or if you have to rescue the princess. They like the exact same things as men who like those games, and they just want good games, nothing more nothing less. And most of them feel that all this rambling on about representation is distracting from the real issue: big developers and publishers are making shitty games for mass appeal instead of the kind of awesome games we played growing up. When you distract from that to rant about what is literally imaginary misogyny you’re hurting women like me who just want good games.

Notice that it’s all the same lunacy that we’ve seen in the SFWA, only not quite as out of control because there are more barriers to entry. Quinn-van Valkenberg tends to remind one of a female John Scalzi, albeit with less talent for self-promotion. Game development is hard work and requires some logical thinking as well; it’s not just a simple case of scribbling a few short stories, sending them to a female friend who will publish them in some barely qualifying market, then calling yoursef a writer and spending the next twenty years going to cons, talking about books you’re never going to write, and relentlessly trying to push the industry leftward. The SJW problem in gaming and their tedious, decades-long crusade for More Women tends to revolve around the journalists because that’s the one area where absolutely no talent or mastery of the subject is required anymore.

I thought this comment from an interview with her ex-boyfriend was more than a little amusing:

“*IF* (that’s strong emphasis) Zoe came out and confessed about all of her wrongdoings, what do you think would happen and do you think things would change?”
See: Hugo Schwyzer.

The Rageaholic points out that the real problem isn’t that Zoe Quinn is an ambitious whore, she is merely a symptom of corruption in game journalism. The real problem is that such whoring is, apparently, a genuine career path in independent gaming, and, presumably, videogame journalism. As he correctly declares: “The term ‘videogame journalism’ is a misnomer.”

Kotaku and the Quinnspiracy

Despite having been involved with the game industry in various ways since 1992, I’ve never given a damn about Gawker media and its Kotaku site. It mostly strikes me as a sort of Gamers Lite site, more dedicated to pageviews than games, and full of the sort of “gamers” who wouldn’t know the difference between War at Sea and World in Flames. And while in some ways they are properly representative of the new breed of meaningless repetitive game with nothing but cartoon graphics that I, for one, can’t bother playing, it’s simply not the sort of site that I have ever bothered reading. I’m more interested in the latest VASSAL mod.

As for Zoe Quinn, she’s the same sort of no-talent nobody that has been getting serially promoted for simultaneously possessing a vagina while feigning an interest in games for as long as I can remember. I’m old enough that I can remember one of the early girl game pioneers, Brenda Laurel, putting her hand on my leg and expressing an inordinate amount of interest in whatever I was saying back when CGDC was still at the Santa Clara Westin, the only thing that is different now is that a) Laurel had genuine talent and b) the Johnny Wilsons and Chris Lombardis and Mike Wekslers and Terry Colemans of the gaming media had integrity.

However, with the exception of Computer Gaming World and my original game review column, (the second nationally syndicated game review column, I should note), gaming journalism has always been more or less corrupt. Even its better magazines, such as Game Informer, began as marketing vehicles. Unlike most game reviewers, I never accepted anything except games for review from anyone, certainly not sexual favors, and I never gave any game a favorable review that didn’t fully merit it. That’s why I was the only game developer permitted to do reviews in CGW.

However, Quinn and her foolish supporters are going to learn, as Nixon did, that the coverup is worse than the crime. Not that I would have been inclined to take her seriously anyhow, but whatever credibility she had with those less experienced than I am will be shot by now. Certainly Gamer Headlines seems unimpressed.

Speculation turned to accusation yesterday, when Zoe’s ex-boyfriend make a post on his own blog, accusing her (with proof) of cheating with a number of prominent industry figures. Among them was current Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson, apparently solicitating sexual favours for positive press.

Pretty simple, right? The developer in question loses credibility, along with the gaming publication that allowed such a massive breach of professionalism occur. Except the rabbit hole has been going further than that. Not only has she been swapping blow for positive press, but also leveraging her sexual connections to stamp out anybody critical of her, most notably the organisers of ‘Women’s Game Jam’, who accuse the indie developer of encouraging a press blackout on the charity Jam to promote her own similar event.

Seriously, who are these nobodies? Some guy whose one game sold 200k copies and a woman who begs for money to make videos complaining about games are supposedly figures of note?

The cult of Dicky Dawk

Richard Dawkins is moving into some very strange territory:

My man in the pub was at the very low end of what believers will do and pay for: the Richard Dawkins website offers followers the chance to join the ‘Reason Circle’, which, like Dante’s Hell, is arranged in concentric circles. For $85 a month, you get discounts on his merchandise, and the chance to meet ‘Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science personalities’. Obviously that’s not enough to meet the man himself. For that you pay $210 a month — or $5,000 a year — for the chance to attend an event where he will speak.

When you compare this to the going rate for other charismatic preachers, it does seem on the high side. The Pentecostal evangelist Morris Cerullo, for example, charges only $30 a month to become a member of ‘God’s Victorious Army’, which is bringing ‘healing and deliverance to the world’. And from Cerullo you get free DVDs, not just discounts.

But the $85 a month just touches the hem of rationality. After the neophyte passes through the successively more expensive ‘Darwin Circle’ and then the ‘Evolution Circle’, he attains the innermost circle, where for $100,000 a year or more he gets to have a private breakfast or lunch with Richard Dawkins, and a reserved table at an invitation-only circle event with ‘Richard’ as well as ‘all the benefits listed above’, so he still gets a discount on his Richard Dawkins T-shirt saying ‘Religion — together we can find a cure.’

The website suggests that donations of up to $500,000 a year will be accepted for the privilege of eating with him once a year: at this level of contribution you become a member of something called ‘The Magic of Reality Circle’. I don’t think any irony is intended.

At this point it is obvious to everyone except the participants that what we have here is a religion without the good bits.

What a pity for him that “Scientology” is already taken. You know, I’d have a private breakfast or lunch with people for a mere $25,000. Actually, that’s not quite true. I’d have private lunches or dinners. Since I prefer a silent breakfast, accompanied by reading rather than talking, you’re just not going to get your money’s worth.

As it happens, membership in the Dread Ilk is free and BYOG. Which, of course, stands for Bring Your Own Gun. Not that there isn’t a rigorous test, which consists of old-timers such as Nate and the Ghost of Bane staring you and your weapon of choice down with narrowed eyes. If they grunt and turn away, you’re in. If they spit and shake their heads, you’re out. Of course, if you show up with anything in 9mm and you’re not a lady, there is a good chance that if you are accepted, you’ll be sent to the Queer Party Friends brigade. Show up with a Glock and you may as well wear heels.

The most amusing part of the piece is definitely the comments, as the Dicky Dawk cultists show up in force. I’m sure you’ll be very surprised to know that the author, an atheist, is repeatedly assumed to be, and accused of being, a Christian. Because, after all, there can be no criticism of the Great Master that is not rooted an irrational and unscientific attachment to the evilist of all evil religions. They repeat by rote the usual Dawkinsian nonsense such as this:

Why would xenophobia, racism, rape or sexual infidelity be any more wrong if God did exist? You cant get an ought from an is, even if the “is” is devine. If an act is “moral” only because God commands it, then performing that act isn’t morality, merely blind craven obedience to a divine dictator – who, if the Old Testament is to be believed, frequently ordered his worshippers to commit genocide, rape and child abuse.

Morality: “conformity to the rules of right conduct”. So performing the act that God commands, which is conforming to the rules of conduct declared to be right by the Creator, is, without question morality. Whether the conformity is “blind craven obedience” or brave, self-determined voluntary compliance, the act is moral.

Which also means that xenophobia, racism, rape or sexual infidelity can only be wrong IF the intrinsically legitimate superhuman authority a) exists, and b) has set rules of right conduct that those things specifically violate.

Psychoanalysis and a surprise endorsement

The strange thing about these weird little fen is that they proudly proclaim how different and unusual they are, then turn around and assume that everyone else must share their priorities and values. Their psychological issues are often apparent in the way they contradict themselves, not just over time, but often in the course of the same statement. Our Friend Damien is now theorizing, on the basis of his own extensive experience with psychological issues, that I’m on the verge of a mental breakdown… because I didn’t win a trophy? Which is particularly funny in light of McRapey’s recent multi-platform meltdown.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Well, if I’m any judge of mental breakdowns, Theodore Beale’s borderline personality disorder will be revving towards implosion around now.

Geoffrey D. Wessel
Fuck him anyhow.

Fred Kiesche ‏@FredKiesche
@damiengwalter You sure about that? Because he seems to think this is all a good thing from the most recent tweet.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
 If I’m any judge, yes 😉

The Erudite Ogre ‏@eruditeogre
That is fascinating.

Fred Kiesche ‏@FredKiesche
Especially given the results in the vote breakdown document. Western Union couldn’t have been clearer.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Also highlights how deluded he is. He genuinely believes he has thousands of “Ilk”, when it’s just a few dozen +

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
+ bozos and berks who log on to his blog day after day to argue to rant about stuff they hate.

The Erudite Ogre ‏@eruditeogre
I peeked at his website. He’s going with a badge of honor strategy to interpret the results.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Of course. The real burn comes in a few weeks when we’ve all stopped talking about him.

Fred Kiesche ‏@FredKiesche
Wait, who?

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
What? Did you say something?

The Erudite Ogre ‏@eruditeogre
He’s deep in his echo chamber right now. Once the adoration wears off he’ll write something utterly assholish.

Apparently the real burn has been postponed, as they’re still not done talking about the worthy winners of the Hugo Award. Oh, wait, no, they’re still talking about me.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Theo’s been absolutely and publicly humiliated by the community his pathology has fixated on. I genuinely hope he finds a good therapist.

Arthur Chu ‏@arthur_affect
I find this very doubtful. The whole narrative revolves around persecution & oppression, he publicly predicted he’d lose

SFReviews.net/SFF180 ‏@SFReviewsnet 10h
Meh, people like him have a remarkable skill at constructing narratives in which they come out on top no matter what happens.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Most likely he’ll ball up in bitter rage that will cripple the rest of his pitiful life. No change there then!

Geoffrey D. Wessel ‏@gdwessel
I wonder if, perhaps, unilaterally, people paid him neither mind nor money? Then what?

Arthur Chu ‏@arthur_affect
Plenty of ppl already don’t. That’s why the escalation

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Give it a few weeks, the attention he needs will dissipate, and we’ll find out.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Eventually people get bored of the story.

Arthur Chu ‏@arthur_affect
Vox didn’t get “purged” bc he suddenly decided to start being a racist. He’d been a racist for years

Arthur Chu ‏@arthur_affect
He got “purged” bc for the 1st time he directed a racist screed at a specific person, & marked it to go on Twitter

Geoffrey D. Wessel ‏@gdwessel
Yes, I know all that. 🙂 But ironically, it’s all this that got him the mass attention to begin with.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
That’s why borderlines are very difficult. They fixate on a group and will do anything to get attention from it.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
And his gang of halfwits will start losing interest now because he’s been shown to be weak.

Geoffrey D. Wessel ‏@gdwessel
Well, either that, or the conspiracy moanings will ramp up. Either way, fuck him.

john_zeleznik ‏@john_zeleznik
 Regretfully this plays into he and his goons narrative.

john_zeleznik ‏@john_zeleznik
A nitwit like Beale that has a ridiculous monicker like Vox Day is too ignorant to be humiliated.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
That’s what malformed personalities do, they create new identities in an attempt to belong somewhere.

Geoffrey D. Wessel ‏@gdwessel
Self-fulfillig prophecies often do.

Isn’t it clever and witty when they pretend not to know who they are going on and on about? The remarkable thing about their bizarre attempts to psychoanalyze me is that all of this is the result of a single tweeted link. That’s how desperate for attention I was: I wrote a single blog post in response to a Vibrant American who was publicly lying about me, then tweeted the link. If that’s not attention-whoring, well, what is?

Spacebunny’s response to all this cracked me up: Have to leave @voxday alone for a couple of hours – better lock up the guns before I leave.

But I couldn’t be too down, as John Scalzi was, despite our many differences, gracious enough to review “Opera Vita Aeterna”. He was really too kind, writing: “It was like Gene Wolfe… easy to enjoy… deserving of award consideration.” I mean, wow! I can honestly say I never expected my writing to be compared to Gene Wolfe’s in any way, shape, or form. And by a Hugo Award winner, no less! It’s very heartening.

Anyhow, now that I have been shown to be less than massively popular among a small community of physically decrepit freaks weak, I will completely understand if you begin losing interest now.

Would-be Salon writer visits Alpha Game

It started with a seemingly innocent series of five emails, which I distilled down to part of one:

Can you give me a quick, couple-paragraph summary of the overall AG philosophy? I think that a large part of it is that it’s about not being/appearing weak. What exactly is weakness? Is kindness weakness? Is gentleness weakness? Or is it more that reticence and insecurity in your decisions and beliefs are weaknesses?

I addressed it. Two days later, I addressed another one:

Basically, “how dare you not be interested in me when I was interested in you?” Even though I had made it very clear that I was not interested, he had assumed that I still was. He did the right thing, I guess. He didn’t give up when I turned him down. But it was pretty revolting, rather than attractive.

I reached some conclusions and promptly lost interest:

Anyhow, the point is that outside of sex, women aren’t very interested in men and their interests and men have even less interest in women and theirs. It is a simple and straightforward observation, there is nothing wrong with this perfectly normal state of affairs, and the better you understand it, the more easily you will get along with the opposite sex. 

But then the man about whom she was writing sent me an email. Which is when hilarity ensued.

I’m the guy from the story. For what it’s worth, I read through both the post and the extensive comments section. I was absolutely shocked to find this post, since Eliza never mentioned to me that she intended to make this story public…. seems like some of the people posting had some misconceptions about me and how I acted — and after reading Eliza’s piece, I can hardly blame them!

She reacted angrily by outing the gentleman by linking to his social media accounts and managed to out herself in the process. It turns out that the ever-so-curious Eliza is a writer named Eliza Hecht who was doing research for what one presumes will be another hit piece on the Androsphere.

Monsterboobz

David Futrelle is apparently a connoisseur of movies about violent homosexual pedophilia. One commenter notes:

David Futrelle has claimed that a photo of a 17 y.o. girl in a bikini or a tight pair of jeans is ‘child porn’. But a film containing nothing but graphic scenes of naked children as young as 14 being raped, mutilated, forced to eat faeces, tortured, and murdered, isn’t. Sums up what a disturbing psychopathic freak he is.

But let’s be fair and let the great defender of women’s suffrage speak for himself:

The movie in question is considered a classic. It’s not porn or torture porn. It’s on Netflix. I wrote about a censorship controversy involving it. I didn’t offer an assessment of the film itself.

Considered a classic? By whom, Hannibal Lector? This is how the movie he claims is “considered a classic” is described: “This grotesque sexploitation movie is officially banned in 15 different
countries, although, as stated above, it should undoubtedly be
automatically classed as the worst form of child pornography. Its
defenders claim that it makes an artistic statement about the
‘corruption of power over innocence and youth’. The abusers in the film
are portrayed as Italian wartime fascists who kidnap eight teenage boys
and girls and subject them to 120 days of grotesque sexual torture and
humiliation before murdering them.”

Sounds like a real classic. It also sounds like Futrelle would fit right in with the SFWA.

And now, a moment of silence

For Our Friend Damien’s abortive SF career:

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
I don’t believe I can claim to belong in SF any longer. That makes me a little sad, but also excited.

While I did advise Our Friend that he ought to go ahead and quit as per his declaration concerning his distaste for the true demographics of the SF community, I don’t think I can take all the blame for this sad loss to world literature. Any reasonable mind will clearly conclude that it is mostly the fault of that dreadful D-List author, Larry Correia: 

The Official Alphabetical List of Author Success

A List – High upon Mount Olympus They Gaze Down Upon the Pathetic Mortals = All the $

  •  Authors who are worth more than the GDP of some countries.
  •  Authors who build their houses out of gold bars.
  •  Characters from their books get their own theme parks.
  •  The lady who wrote Twilight.

B List – The King(s) =$$$$$$$$$$

  • Authors who have TV shows about their books starring Peter Dinklage.
  • Authors who sleep on large piles of money.
  • Politicians who get illegal campaign contributions masquerading as advances.
  • Oprah’s Book Club

and all the way down to:

X List – The X

  • Writes violent pornographic bondage fan fiction involving My Little
    Ponies, Voltron, and Breaking Bad on the internet, while dressed in a
    stained bunny costume that looks like a strange gimp version of that
    thing from Donnie Darko.
  • Don’t make any sudden moves.
  • We’re just going to walk away real slow now.

Y List – The Yama

  • A primordial creature barely capable of vomiting words onto a page in a
    blasphemous impersonation of the act of writing, so mind shattering and
    terrible that a single story threatened to end language forever. He is
    The Thing That Should Not Be. To read his foul creations will summon the
    Black Goat of the Woods with its Thousand Young, and it will kill your
    muse and sodomize the corpse.
  • Is confident that he’d be a much
    more successful writer than A-X, if only he wasn’t too busy stalking
    Asian women on the internet to actually submit any of his crayon
    scribbles.
  • The reason sci-fi conventions have security.

Z List –  The Guardian’s Village Idiot = ($)

  • A kind of Anti-Author.
  • Motivated by delusions of relevancy, crowd sources witch hunts against writers higher on the list.
  • Collects the opposite of royalties, and actually has to be paid a strange sort of “Book Welfare” to produce a book.

I’m sure we will all be waiting, with no small amount of anticipation, to learn what genre Our Friend Damien will be not writing in next.

The pinkshirts are trembling

And it’s not merely Amazon that is scaring them. What’s amusing about this is that the truth is finally beginning to dawn on Damien… that he and all his weird little friends are in the minority. Their little freakshow extravaganza of diversity and left-wing ideology only existed thanks to the gatekeepers and now they’re getting blown out of the water by people like Larry Correia, Tom Kratman, John Wright, Sarah Hoyt, the Mad Geniuses and hundreds of other ambitious writers who don’t have to kowtow to their ridiculous demands or respect their absurd dogma any longer.

One noticeable difference between John Scalzi and Damien Walter is that McRapey is a master of self-marketing who always understood that there were as many, if not more, people on the right side of the ideological fence as the left. And Scalzi was, in the past, assiduously careful to maintain good relations with the other side, until he lost his temper and let the mask slip too egregiously. Damien, on the other hand, simply doesn’t grasp that Fox News is not an outlier, it is an indicator. He simply cannot fathom that there are far more people who, if forced to choose, will genuinely prefer what I stand for, sanity and civilization, over his diverse band of deviants, weirdos, race hustlers, and outright sex criminals.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
Vox has a core of a few hundred regular readers. They may be sad losers, but they’re enough to effect a small Hugo voter pool.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter @mareinna Vox Day is a racist rightwing nutjob. He gathers in his umbra, many of the same. This isn’t really surprising.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
Exactly why letting this clique have a platform within the niche SF community is a very bad idea. @E_M_Edwards @mareinna

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter @mareinna I don’t see how they threaten SF -as a community; outside of their circle, they’re routinely laughed at & despised.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter @mareinna And SF has a not insignificant share of (historically and currently) rightwing, racist, nutjob writers & readers.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter @mareinna They have a platform because, unfortunately, they represent a portion of the human spectrum.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter @mareinna A portion that is pretty awful, even by human standards, but I don’t understand why VD creates such a stir.

Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
@damiengwalter @E_M_Edwards @mareinna I’d be happy if they stuck to their own little niche, but they want to take over the genre.

Martin McGrath ‏@martinmcgrath
@damiengwalter So why would you tweet links to their hateful words?

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna That’s not going to happen though.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter 2h
Only because at this point he’s been allowed a platform. Kick him off that platform and there’s no problem.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna And I fear it’s wishful thinking to consider racism & fascist tendencies a ‘niche’ in SF.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
@martinmcgrath Because he’s already got himself a Hugo nomination. Ignoring the issue became moot at that point.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna Certainly from a historical point of view, it is a recognizable thread in genre. As it is in the world

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
@E_M_Edwards If that as the case I would leave the community. It’s a *tiny* minority, but vocal.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna I think you have to support a more diverse SF community because you’ll not ever stamp it out.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna But I’m less sure you’ll ever snip it out of the overall pattern. It will remain, and reappear.

Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
@E_M_Edwards @damiengwalter @mareinna I was lucky that my early exposure was via bookstore which kept fascist books off their shelves.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna And I’m not saying that out of some ‘free speech’ argument.

Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
@damiengwalter @E_M_Edwards @mareinna Whenever these jerks spew their crap again, I feel like leaving.

who needs words @mareinna
@E_M_Edwards @damiengwalter maybe because he kerps writing tirades against writers who in turn give him publicity by defending themselves?

Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
@E_M_Edwards @damiengwalter @mareinna The SFF community is getting more diverse, that’s why these folks are furious.

Arthur Wyatt ‏@arthurwyatt
@damiengwalter I’m pretty sure it’s not people who have actually read his stuff you need to worry about.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter You’re an idealist. I don’t see VDs values as those of a tiny minority. He’s just more visible.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter In no small measure, I suspect, because it is a part – and I dread this phrase- of his personal brand.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@E_M_Edwards If you prove to be correct, I’ll leave the community. In an instant.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna Agreed. There is always a push back by groups who have had more of a majority share, when it shrinks.

Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
@E_M_Edwards @damiengwalter @mareinna VD is the radical fringe. IMO the Correias, Kratmans, Ringos, Hoyts are the bigger problem.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna But that doesn’t mean they’re going to disappear. Which is why diversity best use of energy, I feel.

Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert 2h
@E_M_Edwards @damiengwalter @mareinna Cause they pretend to be the reasonable mainstream and silent majority.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter Your choice, OC. But why? Better to add your weight to the counterbalance then throw out your toys.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna Again, I agree, mostly. Though I suspect some of their ‘moderate’ stance is just as calculated.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
@E_M_Edwards Why? If SF is mostly bigots and racists it can go fuck itself. But, it isn’t, you’re wrong on this.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@CoraBuhlert @damiengwalter @mareinna Which doesn’t mean they disagree with people like VD. But they’re rather he be the lightning rod.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter I don’t believe it is however, a ‘tiny’ minority. Or even a radical fringe.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
@E_M_Edwards If it was even a substantial minority. It isn’t. @CoraBuhlert @mareinna

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter Is VD radical within it? Likely yes. Both personally and due to his positioning, but a black swan? No.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
@E_M_Edwards Again, if you prove to be right, I’ll leave it. No point repeating this again.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter OK. I can hear you don’t want it to be. It would be more useful perhaps, to have real figures.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter Which I don’t have either, so I’m not saying you have to have them to have an opinion.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter But I’m not swayed by your conviction, without them.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
@E_M_Edwards Do you think VD deserve a Hugo award? You’re derailing on to an irrelevancy here.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter I hope not. Even if we don’t agree on much. I’d rather you were out there in it than VD

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
    @damiengwalter Which sounds like weaker praise than it is meant. 😉

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter I’m hard pressed to think of anyone I’d rather have active in SF than VD. Likely they’re out there.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
@E_M_Edwards I’ll happily go back to ignoring the idiot when the SF community stops letting him hijack it as a platform for his bile.

E. M. Edwards @E_M_Edwards
@damiengwalter And if he does or doesn’t, how exactly – considering the limits & flaws of the Hugo – prove a point?

@damiengwalter I’m not sure that will happen. We make our own platforms these days and the margins are very porous.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
@E_M_Edwards Given the small number of votes required, and coordination with other cons, it seems possible.

Cora Buhlert ‏@CoraBuhlert
If he or Correia win, the Hugos will have become a complete joke.

Cora Buhlert @CoraBuhlert
Actually, these people are a big part of the reason I’m not going to Loncon.

TL;DR: We’re winning. Already.

First of all, it is, as usual, amusing to see them still failing to understand that this blog is considerably better trafficked than the blog that was celebrated and respected for years as the biggest blog in science fiction. Prior to the SFWA’s decision to purge me, the blogs were running just over one million pageviews per month. They’re now running at 1.4 million per month, a 40 percent increase in only one year. No one is “letting me have a platform” and SFWA has already tried to kick me off it. How did that go for them?

Second, I don’t have a core of a few hundred regular readers. I have a core of a few thousand regular readers and a hard core of a few hundred Dread Ilk. I don’t lead them and they don’t follow me. If I quit tomorrow, a dozen would take my place, some of them smarter and more articulate than me.

Third, to quote the Real Slim Shady: “I have been sent here to destroy you.
And there’s a million of us just like me, who cuss like me; who just don’t give a fuck like me. Who dress like me; walk, talk and act like me.”

Every day. Literally EVERY SINGLE DAY, I get emails from people who thank me for speaking out, who tell me how glad they are that someone is finally standing up to the freaks and deviants and pedophiles, who let me know that they are reading SF again for the first time in years, who send Castalia submissions saying how glad they are to know they will get a fair shake and an impartial reading that isn’t based on political correctness and diversity checkboxes.

E.M. Edwards is more right than he knows. Damien reminds me of the troll, Andrew Marston, who once said that it made him feel suicidal to know that I had over 200 Twitter followers. Well, Damien should throw in the towel and quit right now, today, because the sane, civilized, and traditional side of SF/F is not only bigger than he knows, it is bigger than he fears. And it is going to grow bigger still.

The pinkshirts are hoping the worst has passed and yet we have barely even begun to get started. They have no idea, none, about what is coming down the pipeline. Just wait until there are ten bestselling Correias and 20 outspoken VDs and even more young right wing radicals who make Tom Kratman look soft and have less sympathy for the pinkshirts than we do.

Baen is kicking ass. Castalia is exceeding every expectation. The selfies and indies are eviscerating the gatekeepers as Amazon crushes the Big Five. Read those frightened tweets and smile, because we are only now beginning to light the fires that will engulf them.

UPDATE: Now Damien is demonstrating, again, that he can’t comprehend what he reads. This lack of reading comprehension may be related to his dearth of literary success:

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
You see, this is what happens when you let racists on your award ballot. Hugos utterly discredited at this point.

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
“So who are the Hugo noms this year?” “Oh you know, some Hard SF, some Fantasy…and a man who advocates acid attacks on women.” +

Damien Walter @damiengwalter
+ Do you see where that departs the usual “Hugos are broken” narrative?

The fact that I can understand and even articulate a logical case for acid attacks on women when challenged to do so does not mean that I endorse or advocate it. Damien is reduced to trying to score cheap rhetorical points; he hasn’t learned yet that if you want any credibility in the public commentary game, you simply cannot fold, spindle, or mutilate the object of your criticism’s words.

In any event, it’s not as if the Hugos could further discredit themselves after awarding Best Novel to Redshirts, a mediocre one-joke derivative of a previous parody of Star Trek. And has he read “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love”? Ye cats.

Call people “fucking cowards” and whatever other names you want, Damien. It doesn’t matter. It’s over. Your nightmare is just beginning.