Tag: Hugo Award

Fingerprints on the prize

SciFi Pundit shows that once again, if John Scalzi says it, you can be pretty confident that it isn’t true:

WHATEVER:   John Scalzi announced on his blog today that he had predicted white chocolate M&M’s in his book The Android’s Dream. Unfortunately for Mr. Scalzi, white chocolate M&M’s, called Pirate Pearls, were already on the market in 2006 when his novel about killing aliens by farting (yes, really) was published. Apparently, ripping off Robert A. Heinlein (or Philip K. Dick, or Joe Haldeman, or Gene Roddenberry) isn’t sufficient to give someone powers of prognostication.

That’s actually a good heuristic for any SJW. Did they say it? Are they an SJW? Then it probably isn’t true.  Consider the following statements from the now-defunct Staffer’s Book Review:

“Opera Vita Aeterna” by Vox Day, the originator of the Sad Puppy Slate, received far fewer votes than No Award, which took fifth place. “Opera Vita Aeterna” did not place at all. In fact, 698 ballots refused to even recognize “Opera Vita Aeterna” existed.

Actually, 698 ballots had no preference between “Opera Vita Aeterna” and No Award, which means virtually the opposite of what  Mr. Landon is suggesting. All that meant was that having voted for their preferred finalist(s), the voters didn’t bother ranking the rest of them. One could also say, with equal justification, that 234 ballots refused to even recognize that the winner, “Lady Astronaut of Mars”, existed.

But more importantly, Vox Day was not the originator of the Sad Puppy Slate. Vox Day was not involved in any way with the Sad Puppy Slate; he was not even registered to vote for it. Vox Day was also not the originator of the Sad Puppy 2 Slate last year. Vox Day was not involved in any way with the Sad Puppy 2 Slate, except in that one of his works appeared on it. That’s like saying Jim Butcher is the originator of the Rabid Puppy Slate. It is true, however, that Vox Day is involved with the Sad Puppy 3 Slate and is the originator of the Rabid Puppy Slate.

Mr. Landon, who now writes for Tor.com, might be forgiven for his ignorantly erroneous ways were it not for that it appears to be his obvious ideological bias that is leading him to assert things that simply are not true. Consider the fine line he tries to invent here:

Where Vox Day and Larry Correia intentionally sabotaged the process, authors like Seanan McGuire are finding themselves disproportionately represented due to a consistently adoring fan base. Without the Sad Puppy Slate, McGuire would have been nominated in Best Novel, Best Novella, and Best Novellete. She appears three times on the Best Novella longlist, three times on the Best Novelette long list, once on the Best Short Story longlist, once on the Best Related Work longlist, and once on the Best Fancast longlist. Many of these nominations totals are around 30 ballots. I do not believe McGuire has in any way intentionally manipulated the ballot, but the mere fact that she has fans willing to nominate everything she publishes in a given year, and the fact she’s rather prolific, has created a glaring issue. There simply aren’t enough ballots cast in the nominating process to weed out the obsessive fan. Whether it’s Vox Day and his crazy or Seanan McGuire and her charisma, the Hugo nomination process is flawed.

So, we’re supposed to believe that Seanan McGuire putting herself on the Hugo  longlist nine times in one year is totally unintentional and indicative of nothing more than her charisma, but Larry Correia putting himself on the longlist once in a single category somehow means that Vox Day intentionally sabotaged the process? Now THAT is seriously crazy. It hurts the mind to even try to trace back how much doublethink is required to produce that conclusion.

But it does raise one question. Where did Seanan McGuire learn this little trick of charismatically inspiring such consistent adoration? Well, you’re not going to believe this, but it brings us right back to McRapey! Consider these nominations from the 2009 Hugo longlist:

54 Best Novel, 09 Best Novella, 24 Short Story, 23 Fan Writer, 31 Related Work, 45 Drama Long

We’re supposed to believe that this is all just the consequence of “a consistently adoring fan base”, right? Unfortunately, there is one little problem with that explanation. Those six appearances on the longlist occurred back when Scalzi had 308,745 pageviews per month. How very strange, then, that his appearances on the longlist abruptly dropped to the following in 2012 despite his site traffic more than tripling in the interval, even hitting its all-time monthly peak at 1,027,644 that year. From the 2012 Hugo longlist.

79 Novella

And keep in mind that we are supposed to believe that all of these Scalzi ballots from 2009 and 2012, none of which amounts to even half of the 183 nominating ballots cast for Larry Correia last year, are somehow more valid or more genuinely indicative of the former’s popularity than the latter’s. And yet, even the 69 ballots cast for me (which, by the way, shows far less SP2 voting in lockstep than the Scalzi-Stross alliance in 2008), were at least 15 more than were cast for Scalzi in any of the six categories in 2009.

The only conclusion we can reach from all this is that the SJWs don’t believe your votes are valid, simply because you are casting them for the evil people. Don’t ever forget that. But you need not fear, because you have a great defense attorney speaking out on your behalf, namely, Mr. John Scalzi, Esq.

I see that Seanan McGuire is getting a fair ration of crap from various quarters because she’s on the ballot a remarkable and record-setting five times, including in the Best Novel category, and twice in Novelette. What I’m seeing heavily implies that McGuire’s on the list because she has an apparently mystical ability to drive hordes of fans to nominate her for everything no matter what. Hey, I have an alternate theory, which goes a little something like this: Seanan McGuire is a very talented writer! Who writes things that people like! Including the people who nominate for the Hugos! Seems the simpler explanation, all things considered.

Let’s say it again: change the Hugos by nominating, voting and participating, or (much more slowly and far less reliably) actively making your case to the people who are nominating, voting and participating. As a pro tip, explicitly or implicitly disparaging their intelligence, taste or standing to make choices when you try to do that is unlikely to persuade them to decide anything other than that you’re probably an asshole.
– John Scalzi, April 5, 2013

“Change the Hugos by nominating!” That is a proper battle cry. One can hardly fault Mr. Correia for taking to heart the advice of such a distinguished and oft-nominated science fiction luminary. Let’s say it again indeed.

More Hugo predictions

One Aled Morgan responds to the Chaos Horizon Hugo predictions, which were as follows:

  1. Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer
  2. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
  3. Monster Hunter Nemesis, Larry Correia
  4. The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
  5. Skin Game, Jim Butcher  

First, the two I’d be astonished not to see on the ballot:

Lock In
Ancilliary Sword

Then very likely:

The Three Body Problem
Annihilation

Then at about the same level of probability fighting for the fifth slot:

Monster Hunter Nemesis
My Real Children
The Goblin Emperor
Symbiont

Possible but unlikely:

The Peripheral
The Darkling Sea

What you’re overlooking about Scalzi is that he has a massively popular blog, he has orders of magnitude more readers than the “Sad Puppies”, and while he never opersteps the line he encourages his fans to nominate him… and they do. The same goes for Grant, who has made the ballot so often already but doedn’t win — she has the same kind of nominating fans.

For the Hugos, what’s important is not wide readership but readership within Worldcon going fandom. Lots of the measures you’re assessing would be great if this were a wide-constituency vote, but it isn’t. It’ll be around two thousand people. SFWA’s even smaller, and everyone in SFWA knows each other. Butcher’s really really popular in the wider constituency, but his books don’t feel like the kind of thing people nominate for Hugos to the people who nominate, so I’d say it has zero chance except with Sad Puppies. And I expect a backlash against Sad Puppies this year.

I have to admit, The Three-Body Problem looks pretty good. I find the concept interesting, seeing as I used a variant of it to explain some of the problems with Keynesian economic theory in RGD. As a fan of Japanese literature both ancient and modern, I’m curious to see what Chinese SF is like. I tried Vandermeer’s Balzac’s War and ended up putting it down before long, but perhaps his Southern Reach Trilogy is better. In any event, Holmwood, who both reads the occasional Scalzi book and is a Sad Puppy supporter, offers a mild correction:

John Scalzi is a good author. I enjoyed both Old Man’s War and Agent to the Stars. His books are pushed heavily by his publisher (deservedly so) and Lock-In was a better work than Redshirts which won previously. That said, I believe his blog’s readership is a good deal smaller than (say) that of Vox Day, and certainly smaller than Day, Correia, Wright, Torgersen, Hoyt, etc combined.

Back to the general topic of Puppies, sad and otherwise.

I would be both surprised and disappointed if Puppies locked up overwhelmingly to vote a slate en masse without regard to quality. So far that’s not been the case, though I’m well aware there are those who’d love to poke a stick in the putative SF establishment fans’ collective eyes and do just that.

But this, while very well and good, VIOLATES THE NARRATIVE. Tudor leaps in to explain that Whatever is not merely big. It is ENORMOUS:

Scalzi’s blog is not big, is enormous. There are many good SF writers, but there are only a handful NY Times Bestsellers. Scalzi became one because of his blog. I only like some of his books but even I read his blog regularly. And if an author will write on his blog about her/his new book, than it’s certain that its sales will receive a great boost.

And so it fell to me to actually provide the relevant facts of the matter:

John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever, is not reasonably described as “enormous” and his blog readership is considerably smaller than mine, let alone the combined readership of the various Sad and Rabid Puppy authors. The most traffic Mr. Scalzi ever had is just over 1 million Google pageviews per month back in May 2012. Since then, his blog traffic has declined to around 450,000 pageviews per month. By comparison, my blogs alone now enjoy traffic of 1.5 million pageviews per month, about three times that of Mr. Scalzi’s Whatever.

In 2014, Mr. Scalzi’s blog had 5.6 million annual pageviews whereas mine had 15.7 million. Where Mr. Scalzi is very popular, however, is on Twitter, where his 70k+ followers are more than all of the aforementioned authors combined. Whether Twitter followers or blog readerships are more predictive of Hugo success, I leave to Chaos Horizon to predict.

The reason many people have a false impression of Mr. Scalzi’s blog is that Mr. Scalzi has historically been prone to a considerable amount of exaggeration. For example, in an August 2010 interview with Lightspeed magazine, he claimed Whatever had 2 million monthly pageviews. The actual number of pageviews that month was 305 thousand, or about 15 percent of the amount claimed.

I do find it intriguing that more than a year after the greater part of Mr. Scalzi’s claimed blog traffic was exposed as nonexistent, there are still those pinkshirts who fail to recognize that the numbers in the science fiction market simply do not add up in the way they apparently believe they do. I wonder what would suffice to convince them otherwise?

As for Holmewood’s concern about quality, I would simply urge the prospective Worldcon voter to compare the Rabid Puppy slate to last year’s Hugo winners. I contend that the Rabid Puppies are, across the board, considerably superior in terms of both science fiction essence and and science fiction quality to the 2014 winners.

Terry Pratchett: an indictment

Chaos Horizon points out the essential absurdity and historical irrelevance of the Hugo and Nebula Awards:

Pratchett never won a Hugo or Nebula award. Neither awards have ever known what to do with humorous/satirical SFF. Both awards failed to live up to the imagination that Pratchett showed in his best work: it’s easier to celebrate the serious and prestigious than the fantastic. Our field should have done better. Pratchett did receive Nebula nominations late in his career, in 2006 (Going Postal) and 2009 (Making Money). Neither are among his best books. Mort, Guards! Guards!, and Small Gods all would have been worthy winners, but I’d draw your attention to 2003, the year that Robert Sawyer won the Hugo for Hominids. Pratchett published The Night Watch in 2002, a twisty time-travel caper, that would have been an outstanding winner for that year.

I am proud to be able to say that I am among those SFWA members who were responsible for both the 2006 and 2009 Nebula nominations. (I also used to regularly nominate Charles Stross for awards, to little avail, back when he actually deserved them.) The fact that Terry Pratchett wasn’t even being NOMINATED when the likes of Catharine Asaro were WINNING was one of the things that first led me to believe there was something very, very rotten in the state of SF/F awards. Here is the review of Going Postal I posted on this blog in September 2004. In case you’re wondering how the review could have been posted in 2004 while the nomination was in 2006, it was because a) the Nebula schedule was bizarre back then, and b) I received a pre-release review copy of it.

In fairness to the Hugos, Pratchett also received a belated Hugo nomination for Going Postal, but he declined it. It’s hard to believe he didn’t even receive a nomination for his best book, Night Watch, in a year when the likes of Picoverse, The Other Wind, Solitaire, Passage, The Curse of Chalion, The Chronoliths, Cosmonaut Keep, and The Bones of the Earth did.

The ghosts of the machine are pro-Puppy

This strikes me as not only amusing, but a propitious omen:

I just logged into Sasquan’s website to make Hugo nominations, and when I first opened my ballot, all the slots were already filled in. It seemed to be entirely with the Sad Puppies slate. It’s my first time nominating, is this kind of thing usual? And if so, why the hell?

I mean, I changed them all, but why were they there?

I’m not entirely sure it was the Sad Puppies party ticket, but Vox Day appeared a surprising number of times.

I don’t know why it should surprise anyone that an Internet Superintelligence should have machine intelligence friends. In any event, these deep mysteries of the cybernetic age aside, it’s been interesting to see some of the predictions concerning the Hugo nominations, both public and private. Chaos Horizon is among those expecting SP/RP to land two Best Novel nominees, Monster Hunter: Nemesis and Skin Game:

3. Monster Hunter Nemesis, Larry Correia: Correia finished 3rd in the 2014 Hugo nominations, with only Leckie and Gaiman placing above him (Gaiman declined the nom). That put him very safely in the field, and the mathematics are in Correia’s favor for this year. While Monster Hunter Nemesis is a slightly odd choice for the Hugos, being 5th in a series and urban fantasy to boot, it’s hard to imagine Correia’s supporters abandoning him en-masse in just one year. Despite the vigor of his campaign, Correia doesn’t haven’t the broad support necessary to win a Hugo.

5. Skin Game, Jim Butcher: Skin Game was part of the “Sad Puppy 3″ slate, but Butcher’s appeal extends well beyond that block of voters. While Butcher has never gotten much Hugo love in the past, he is one of the most popular writers working in the urban fantasy field, and his Henry Dresden novels have been consistently well-liked and well-loved by fans. Even WorldCon voters who don’t agree with the Sad Puppy 3 argument may look at the list, see Butcher, and think, Why not? If Correia can make the slate, so too can Butcher—and Butcher might be even more popular in Sad Puppy realm than Correia. On the negative, this is #14 in a series, and that’s a tough sell to new readers. I’ll be fascinated to see how the vote turns out on this one.

I tend to think he’s discounting Nebula-nominated The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, which I expect will replace either the Addison or the Leckie book on the list of finalists. My suspicion, and it is only that, is that Sad Puppies is going to generally outperform what appears to be the consensus expectations of two nominees per category. Now, I could be entirely wrong and perhaps there is a 650-strong stealth SJW slate that will lock out the Puppies entirely across the board, but I don’t see many signs of that having been successfully organized.

Chaos Horizons also looked the number of expected nominations and predicted the overall performance of Sad Puppies:

In an earlier post, I estimated the total nomination ballots for this year to be around 2350 (that’s pure guesswork, sadly). 330/2350 = 14.0%. Either way, the model gets us in the same ball park: Sad Puppies 3 is likely, at the top end, to account for between 10% and 15% of the 2015 Hugo nominating vote. For good or bad, that will be enough to put the top Sad Puppy 3 texts into the Hugo slate.

2. The data shows that the Sad Puppy 2 campaign fell off fairly fast from the most popular authors like Correia to less popular authors like Toregersen (60% of Correia’s total) and Hoyt (50% of Correia’s total) to Vox Day (33% of Correia’s total). Torgersen and Vox Day made the final slate based on the relatively weakness of the Novella and Novelette categories. While I don’t track categories like Novella, Novelette, or Short Story on Chaos Horizon (there’s not enough data, and I don’t know the field well enough), I expect a similar drop-off to occur this year. If you want to assess the impact of the whole Sad Puppy 3 slate, think about which authors are as popular as Correia and which aren’t.

If we put those two pieces of data together, we get my “Hugo Campaign Model”:

1. A Hugo campaign like “Sad Puppies 3″ will probably account for 10-15% of the 2015 nominating vote.
2. The “Sad Puppies 3″ slate will fall off quickly based on the popularity of the involved authors. 

I don’t think Chaos Horizon is correct about the percentage, however, for two reasons. First, he probably isn’t aware that the Dread Ilk did not get involved until AFTER the nominations were closed. So he’s probably missing about 120 votes right there. Furthermore, we know that an unknown number of Dread Ilk, and an equally unknown number of new Sad Puppies, got involved this year. So, my guess is that his 330 estimate should be at least 500 for the combined Puppies and could be even higher. If we assume his 2,350 estimate is correct, and I find his reasoning to be perfectly plausible there, then the Puppies will represent between 20 and 25 percent of the 2015 nominating vote.

(I note, with some amusement, that the combined Puppy vote will likely exceed the TOTAL Hugo nominating vote for any year prior to 2009. Keep that in mind when anyone tries to claim our votes are somehow unrepresentative, illegitimate, or unfair.)

Second, Chaos Horizon has no reason to understand that the Dread Ilk are far more intelligent, focused, and disciplined than the average readership. But you are, and therefore at least the Rabid Puppies element of the slate is unlikely to fall off quickly on the basis of popularity as it did last year.

Rabid Puppies Final Notice

If you’re registered as a Supporting Member of either LonCon or Sasquan, don’t forget to get your nominations in today. The nominees should be announced in about a month. The list of Rabid Puppies recommendations can be found here while the nomination form is here.

BA noted that the “best editor” categories were originally in the opposite order on the form, so you may want to check your editor nominations to make sure you didn’t put them in the wrong order. I’ve since switched them around on the list, so they should match now. It should be fascinating to see how it all shakes out. To be honest, I have absolutely no idea how things are likely to go, but regardless, I think everyone here will admit that it has certainly been entertaining.

UPDATE: Sasquan, The 73rd World Science Fiction Convention, will announce the
nominees for the 2015 Hugo Awards at Norwescon, starting at noon Pacific
Daylight Time on Saturday, April 4th, 2015. A real-time video stream of the announcements will be available on the
Internet on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/worldcon1

UPDATE 2: If you’re interested in seeing a more comprehensive selection of recommendations, Mike Glyer of File 770 has helpfully compiled all of the various lists in one easy, if extensive, collection.  

Related Works Book Bomb

Larry Correia has posted the third and last of the 2015 Sad Puppies Book Bombs, this one for Related Works and the Campbell nominees:

BOOK BOMB!

This is our last Sad Puppies 3 Book Bomb. Remember, you’ve only got a few more days to get your nominations in for the Hugo awards. The Sad Puppies bombs are special because these are the works in the different categories that the Evil Legion of Evil has put forth as suggestions for our Hugo nomination slate. The last two we did went amazing.

RELATED WORKS:

CAMPBELL AWARD:

Nominations close on March 10, so if you’re registered to vote on the Hugo Awards, don’t forget to review the Rabid Puppies recommendations as they’ve been updated several times to reflect various eligibility issues, gun-shy authors, and other changes. Don’t leave it to the last minute!

In addition to the three Sad Puppies recommendations for the Campbell Award, please note that Rabid Puppies is also supporting Rolf Nelson for his debut novel, The Stars Came Back. Castalia House will be publishing the sequel to it later this year. As before, if you’ve already bought these works, please consider supporting the Bomb by posting a review of them.

Sad Puppies Short Fiction Bomb

The Mountain That Writes turns around and comes back for a second pass:

This Book Bomb is a little different. Because the ones I’m doing right now are to get more people exposed to the works we nominated for the infamous Sad Puppies slate, we’re bombing a bunch of works at the same time. I don’t like putting this many links, but time is of the essence, and next week I’ll post about the Campbell nominees and Best Related Works.

We did three novellas last week and it was a huge success. They’re still selling well a week later. Overall we sold a couple thousands novellas, which in novellas is freaking huge.

But shorter fiction is tough, because it isn’t always available for sale by itself, but is usually bundled as part of an anthology, or in a magazine which often isn’t available on Amazon.

As you can see from the list below, luckily many of these are available on Amazon, and some are available for FREE:

BEST SHORT STORY

Both Rabid Puppies recommendations in the Short Story category can be read for free at the following links. I can attest that Sci Phi Journal #2 is quite good and I think the Big Book of Monsters looks particularly interesting.

I’ve also got a short story you can read which is not part of either slate, but I promised to make it available for free reading, so here it is:

BEST NOVELETTE


“The Journeyman: In the Stone House”by Michael F. Flynn, Analog, June 2014
“Championship B’tok” by Edward M. Lerner, Analog, Sept 2014
“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium” by Gray Rinehart, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show

And the Rabid Puppies recommendation in the Novelette category:

“Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus” by John C. Wright, The Book of Feasts & Seasons

The Book of Feasts & Seasons is presently ranked #15,271 54,462 on Amazon and has a 4.9 rating on 18 16 reviews. It’s genuinely that good, so I’d highly recommend reading it if you haven’t yet, and posting a review if you have.

Book Bomb, second run

Larry announces the Sad Puppies 3 Short Fiction Book Bomb:

Mark your calenders. We will be Book Bombing the short fiction categories this Wednesday.

The Novella Category Bomb was a huge success. Thousands of copies were moved. A week later and they’re still on their respective genres bestseller lists. So basically we made sure that these will be the most widely read items in their category.

Now we’re going to do the same thing for the short stories and novelettes. Sad Puppies is all about getting people to nominate based on what they like, as opposed to what they are supposed to like.

Now, there are some differences in the Rabid Puppies and Sad Puppies recommendations here, so what we’re going to do in addition to fully supporting the Short Fiction Book Bomb is a) post links to the two Rabid Puppies stories by Steve Rzasa and John C. Wright so people can read them for free, and b) post a link to The Book of Feasts & Seasons which contains two Rabid Puppies recommendations, one for novelette and one for short story, so Book Bombers can bomb it if they wish to do so.

I’ll even throw in a link to a free story that is neither on the Sad Puppies nor the Rabid Puppies list, but is one that some of you might enjoy reading if you haven’t already read The Altar of Hate.

As before, if you’ve previously read the works, we encourage you to post reviews on Amazon.

SJWs speak jabber whack

It doesn’t matter if they are anti-Sad Puppies or anti-GamerGate, they are the same sort of liars who will say anything in order to try to discredit the other side. One “Cat”, who may or may not be Cat Rambo, the vice-president of SFWA who recently announced her candidacy to lead the organization, has been running around sites ranging from Larry Correia’s and the Mad Genius Club to Mike Glyer’s File 770, trying to tell everyone she knows what Sad Puppies, and now #GamerGate, are really about. She’s actually jabber-whacking about how Larry Correia’s Book Bomb sold nearly 2,000 novellas and pretty much ensured that the Sad Puppies recommendations, if they are nominated, will be the most widely read nominees on the Hugo ballot.

To get bestseller status you have to start from somewhere and you are using the book bombs to give that start to certain stories that can’t get it on their own. Thus diddling with the bestseller lists, as I said. Meaning the Sad Puppies themselves know that bestseller is not simply a mark of quality.

As for the quality of the Sad Puppies noms, I read them all, and they ended up where they deserved, quality-wise. If “Opera Vita Aeterna” was the best the Sad Puppies had to offer, the Hugos have hardly been missing out on “quality” to this point. (Pro-tip: “quality” stories do not name the woman character after her chest. Not even if there is some marine with a similar nickname for deniability’s sake.)

I see what the Sad Puppies claim they are doing. I just don’t actually care; talk is cheap. Last year’s results make it pretty plain what they’re really doing.

I know what Gamergate is really about, because I pay attention to what they do and who they attack, and who they don’t. Attach Gamergate to your cause if you like being associated with rape and death threats against women who dare to speak about videogames. But in that case you probably shouldn’t get mad when someone points out what you have done.

(Pro-tip: There are no female characters in “Opera Vita Aeterna”. Nor are there any Marines. As it happens, it is a fantasy novelette about a monastery. This tends to raise some serious doubts about Cat’s ability to read, let alone accurately ascertain the quality of what she has nominally “read”.) There were several responses, one of them mine.

You don’t know a damn thing about it, little Kitty-Cat. Because, if
you did, you’d know that I am the Leader of #GamerGate and the link
between #GamerGate and Sad Puppies is considerably more direct than you
believe it to be. #GamerGate is Sad Puppies on nuclear steroids. Everything is bigger.
Literally Who, Literally Who 2, and Literally Wu are scam artists that
make John Scalzi look like a paragon of probity. And you don’t even know
what the issues are.



But here is the similarity. GamerGaters declare we will play the
games we want to play and make the games we want to make. If you don’t
like that, go away and make your own games. Sound familiar?


Ravenshrike added:

You do realize that both the Goon Squad and the GNAA, the two biggest ‘professional’ troll organizations on the internet, have admitted to being active in q/ggate correct? As well the only death threat traced back to an actual person was traced back to a Brazilian clickbait journalist, basically another professional troll. So attempting to throw around guilt by association when I

1. am not active on twatter
2. Can process the fact that assholes on the internet lie about who they are and what they believe in on a regular basis
3. am not interested in bringing up similar arguments about MZB and SD

Being a typical SJW, Cat didn’t have the sense to recant or retreat, but instead doubled-down:

Sorry guys, Gamergate got into the regular news. And now we all know
it’s not about ethics in journalism, it’s about targeting women who dare
to make games, or talk about games, with rape and death threats. 

Ah, the “regular news”. As in Brian Williams, the hero of Baghdad. I pointed out a few obvious facts, such as that Cat was not only a blatant liar, but her lies didn’t even make sense.

  1. Most of the “death threats” and “rape threats” were fake. They never happened.
  2. All of them happened months ago. Last fall. When was the last “rape and death threat”, Cat?
  3. GamerGate is an active group that consists of tens of thousands of
    individuals. Many of them are professional game developers like me. What has #GamerGate been doing for the last six months if there have only been a small handful of supposed
    threats last fall, most of them of dubious legitimacy?
  4. A number of game journalists, some of them influential, have lost
    their jobs. Joystiq closed. Gawker lost over a million dollars in ad
    revenue and “reassigned’ two of its top people. Do you think this is due
    to “rape and death threats”? Or serious problems concerning “ethics in
    journalism”?
  5. Several game journalism sites have adopted ethics guidelines. Do you
    think this just might have something to do with a little ethical problem
    in gaming journalism?

I was the second nationally syndicated game journalist in the USA. I
have written for numerous leading game industry magazines, including Computer Gaming
World, Electronic Entertainment, and Develop. And I can tell you, with
100 percent certainty, that in 2014 there was a MASSIVE ethics problem
in game journalism. And there still is. Any serious game developer will readily
tell you as much.

What are your game industry credentials? What are your game
journalism credentials? What do you know about it beyond watching CSI Law and Order:
SVU?

Shades of #GamerGate

The Otherwhere Gazette releases the Sad Puppies Manifesto:

  • That for Freedom of Speech (and Written Word) to be free, that
    Freedom must be sacrosanct, nothing is off limits, nothing is too
    offensive
  • That Freedom of Speech does not mean freedom not to be Offended, nor to impose your Offense on behalf of others.
  • That Freedom of Speech comes with consequences and others may Consequence your nose if you are too offensive.
  • That Writers must be free to write what they please and that no one has the right to tell them they may not or should not.

Read the rest of it there. But for me, it is the fourth point that is the most important, and the most offensive to the SJWs. If they want to play the numbers game and see who can flex the most muscle, that’s fine. Our side invented the Inquisition and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, after all, and we can play that game better than they ever could.

But we’d rather not. Our side also invented free will and freedom of speech. That’s what we’d prefer. The pinkshirts and SJWs cast those concepts aside at their own peril.