Tag: McRapey

Mailvox: the Collapsing Parodist

Tor sent out an email with a big excerpt from McRapey’s forthcoming attempt to take his inimitable skills at imitation to new heights and rip off both Isaac Asimov and Frank Herbert AT THE SAME TIME:

Enter The Flow With Excerpts from John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire

The Collapsing Empire is available March 21, but in the meantime, you can transport yourself into Scalzi’s interstellar epic with excerpts on Tor.com. We’ll be posting chapters all week; you can get started right away with the prologue and Chapter One, and check back all this week for additional excerpts, collected below. Happy Reading!

Yesterday I received an email from an intrepid SF reader who boldly dared to go where few would bother. His conclusions:

I read the excerpt and postscript of it just yesterday. It is really bad – there’s an entire chapter where strategy or politics is discussed by some lady who has been walked in on while fucking Wesley Crusher, and she just keeps going at it while continuing the conversation. Deeply pathetic.

Wait… it turns out I made a mistake. The Amazon Look Inside copy has missing pages during the Wesley Crusher episode, which is why I thought it consumed most of the chapter. After reading the Amazon sample, I looked at the Wesley Crusher chapter that Tor posted, and she only has her conversation while having sex for about two pages or so. It is nevertheless patently ridiculous, although much much funnier in the Look Inside version where she has her third party conversation for about 15 pages while getting plowed by a boy toy.

Sadly, the misunderstood version is a better yarn. The ironic thing about it is that end of the book gives away that the Flow or whatever it is called has been based on some convoluted lie the entire time. And now they finish by having to establish a new lie to keep the galaxy going, or something.

It is surprisingly devoid of snark. Or anything resembling emotion. It reads like a damned board meeting or something. It’s like he plagiarized SFWA treasury meetings for inspiration.

Oh. My. I’m not surprised in the least. But I am amused. You know that later today, there will be an executive at Macmillan flipping through the book and saying, “wait, Patrick paid HOW much for this shit?” But then, I thought, surely the reviewer exaggerates!

No, as it turns out, no, he isn’t.

Chapter Two

Kiva Lagos was busily fucking the brains out of the assistant purser she’d been after for the last six weeks of the Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby’s trip from Lankaran to End when Second Officer Waylov Brennir entered her stateroom, unannounced. “You’re needed,” he said.


“I’m a little busy at the moment,” Kiva said. She’d just finally gotten herself into a groove, so fuck Waylov (not literally, he was awful) if she was going to get out of the groove just because he walked into it. Grooves were hard to come by. People have sex, and he was unannounced. If this was what he walked into, it was his fault, not hers. The assistant purser seemed a little concerned, but Kiva applied a little pressure to make it clear festivities were to continue.


“It’s important.”


“Trust me, so is this.”


“We’ve got a customs official who won’t let us take any haverfruit off the ship,” Brennir said. If he was shocked or scandalized by Lagos’s activities he was doing a good job of hiding it. He mostly looked bored. “Offloading our haverfruit is why we came to End. If we don’t sell it, or develop licenses, we’re screwed. You’re the owner’s representative. You’re going to have to explain to your mother why this trip was the cause of the financial ruin of your family. So perhaps you might like to join Captain Blinnikka in talking with this customs official right now to see if you can resolve this problem. Or you can just go on fucking that junior crew member, ma’am. I’m sure those are equivalent activities as regards your future, and the future of this ship, and your family.”


“Well, shit,” Kiva said. Her groove was definitely gone, and the assistant purser, her little project, looked pretty miserable at the moment. “That was a pretty impressive jab you just gave to someone who can fire your ass, Brennir.”


“You can’t fire me, ma’am,” Brennir said. “I’ve got tenure with the guild. Now, are you coming or not?”


“I’m thinking.”

Well, it is sort of reminiscent of Asimovian naming conventions, I suppose. Awful as it is, I don’t think it quite manages to top this legendary exchange from the Hugo Award-winning Redshirts, though.

“Man, I owe you a blowjob,” Duvall said.


“What?” Dahl said.


“What?” Hester said.


“Sorry,” Duvall said. “In ground forces, when someone does you a favor you tell them you owe them a sex act. If it’s a little thing, it’s a handjob. Medium, blowjob. Big favor, you owe them a fuck. Force of habit. It’s just an expression.”


“Got it,” Dahl said.


“No actual blowjob forthcoming,” Duvall said. “To be clear”


“It’s the thought that counts,” Dahl said, and turned to Hester. “What about you? You want to owe me a blowjob, too?”


“I’m thinking about it ,” Hester said.   


You can tell from that gritty, realistic dialogue that McRapey has spent a lot of time with manly, military men, doing manly, military things. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that McRapey has written that I find funnier than this absolute jewel of pure, unadulterated fiction.


[Vox] really has a thing for me, which is straight-up pure envy, as far as I can tell.


My dear, very dear, Mr. Scalzi, while there are certainly authors whose literary accomplishments and talents I envy, from Umberto Eco and Hermann Hesse to Tanith Lee and Edgar Allen Poe, I can assure you, with 100 percent honesty, that you are not, and have never been, among them.

Another fake Scalzi “bestseller”

I think we can safely assume, on the basis of this UK cover, that Tor Books is going to be purchasing another dubious one-week appearance for John Scalzi on the New York Times Bestsellers List.

I mean, who could doubt that a book that has been reviewed so positively will fail to meet with anything less than overwhelming enthusiasm from the science fiction book-buying community?

Readers might wonder whether Scalzi can write another space opera that shares the elements that made his Old Man’s War series so popular but be sufficiently different to feel fresh. Both include political plotting, plenty of snark, puzzle-solving, and a healthy dose of action, but there’s just enough here that’s new for this to avoid becoming a retread. There’s nothing groundbreaking, but you’ll still want to find out what happens next.
– Kirkus Reviews

Unless you’ve been a professional reviewer, you may not be able to read between the lines well enough to understand what the reviewer is actually saying in his review. You see, when you want to say something positive about a mediocre book, but also want to avoid completely sacrificing your credibility, the trick is to say nice, cute things about the author that he can run off and happily quote, while assiduously avoiding any overly positive statements about the book itself that will come back to haunt you once the readers discover how mediocre it is.

But that’s neither here nor there; the fact that McRapey wrote another snarky mediocrity is hardly a surprise. The real question is: how could Tor Books possibly know, six weeks before the first book in the series is published, that the forthcoming series can be described as “The New York Times Bestselling Series”?

UPDATE: Amazing. Tor Books has somehow known that The Collapsing Empire would be a New York Times Bestselling series since June 27, 2016, 10 months prior to its scheduled release! That must be some killer psychometric prediction software they’ve got there. That, or they’ve already set aside the cost of a one-week “bestseller” in the marketing budget.

Portrait of a failed strategy

Indignation and posturing having failed in intersectional defense of his interspecies relationships, McRapey tries a new strategy. It does not go well.

  • So… he’s trying to be witty and troll his opponents… by agreeing and amplifying the cuck insult, and making himself look like a creepy gay man?
  • Correct. He’s been doing that since high school.
  • He’s on the bottom rung of the ladder with actual men, who display nothing but disgust and contempt for him, a physical revulsion, since he’s utterly insecure and doesn’t know how to act like a man. So he self-neuters and acts like a woman to get validation from the only people who can stand him. Example A of why fathers are so important to little boys. If all you have to emulate is mommy you may end up like this degenerate.

What is supposed to pass for humor is the Gamma go-to under pressure. First, it’s not funny. Second, it doesn’t actually fool anyone.

UPDATE: Don’t worry, now he’s going to butch it up. On Twitter.

“Why would you punch a Nazi when baseball bats are readily available?” 

So tuff! So fierce! So very 6’3″ Marine badass! The funny thing is that there are almost certainly far more people who would love to see McRapey get punched in the face than ever wanted to see someone hit Richard Spencer. And that’s just the SJWs.

McRapey responds

John Scalzi has bravely risen to defend his ritual public humiliations of his wife against the Chateau’s speciesist scorn:

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
1. Incidentally, it’s a thing with alt-right types to try to run down my marriage, ie, HOW DARE YOU BE BESOTTED WITH YOUR WIFE YOU BETA CUCK
10:59 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
2. And it really just makes me giggle. Yes, you sad little boys. I’m married to a strong awesome equal partner, for 21 years now. How awful!
11:01 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
3. I mean, honestly. I’m not sure how HA HA LOOK AT THIS LOSER WHO DELIGHTS IN HIS MARRIAGE is supposed to be an insult. To ME, anyway.
11:04 PM – 17 Jan 2017

John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
4. Mind you, if being happy with my wife sends them into paroxysms of fury, well, I guess that’s a bonus? But otherwise: Silly little boys.
11:06 PM – 17 Jan 2017

 John Scalzi ✔ @scalzi
5. In sum: Yeah, being married to my wife is super-fabulous. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, any day of the week. And twice on Sundays.
11:14 PM – 17 Jan 2017

You have to see the wedding day picture to believe it. It’s hilarious. As Heartiste observed: I haven’t seen a “lean out” like that since Sheryl Sandberg’s husband set his treadmill speed to “the sweet relief of marital release”.


John, no one is running down your marriage, much less sent into “paroxysms of fury” over your ongoing experiment in interspecies relations. We think it’s great that you’re so happily married to an orc, or half-troll, or whatever it is. No one begrudges you that. We just think it’s funny. Especially when you brag about how strong your offspring are.

HALF-ORCS
These orc–human crossbreeds can be found in either orc or human society (where their status varies according to local sentiments), or in communities of their own. Half-orcs usually inherit a good blend of the physical characteristics of their parents. They are as tall as humans and a little heavier, thanks to their muscle.
    +2 Strength, –2 Intelligence, –2 Charisma.

Mailvox: the illustrated shiv

VFM #7634 wasn’t entirely sure to whom Literally Who’s self-outing as… something was referring.

I’m confused… is this another post about Scalzi?

No, as it happens, THIS is a tremendous post about the most important author in science fiction history, the Fifth of the Big Three, the biggest, baddest, bestselling dog at Tor Books, the man with more Hugo nominations than Arthur C. Clarke or Jerry Pournelle and more Hugo Awards than Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Lester del Rey, Gregory Benford, Norman Spinrad, Terry Pratchett and Iain M. Banks combined, the writer whose innovative “he said, he said, he said” structure has shocked and awed and intimidated the entire science fiction writing community and forever altered the way it approaches writing dialogue.

Our case study today is John Scalzi, a quisling male emblematic of so much that has gone haywire with White American men (and their beards).

Exhibit A: This is Scalzi’s Christmas card. He signed off on it. He approved of it. This is how he wants the world to see him.

Exhibit B: Scalzi in love. Here Scalzi is in the submissive position, an obvious inferior looking up to his wifely better.

Exhibit C: Scalzi smooches. Kissing upward and nuzzling his doughy face into hard manjawline, eyes closed as his hunky lady peers into the middle distance looking burdened with the weight of the world (or for an escape from her husband’s octopus lips), Scalzi eagerly inverts the sexual polarity, taking on the role of the woman in his marriage, ceding all the T to his wife.

Exhibit D: Serious Scalzi. Scalzi tries to look serious (ie like a normal man), but is still out-mugged by his wife, who looks more serious, and tougher, than him.

People have mostly given up trying to sell the narrative, but I always found it bizarre when people tried to claim that I envied John Scalzi. On what planet, and for what reason, would I, or any man, ever envy a gamma male like that?

I find the most interesting thing about Scalzi to be the fact that he somehow managed to delay the inevitable gamma self-implosion until he reached a much higher level of success than is conventionally the case. This suggests that his implosion, when it inevitably comes, is going to be absolutely spectacular.

The best part of the Chateau post is the comments from the women there.

  • What I really despise about this guy is that he’s contributing to the further ruin of science fiction. So why do these mannish women latch on to these beta guys? Seeing stuff like this out of a man makes me hurt inside. It’s instinctive, like being scared of rattlesnakes. How do women kill them in themselves, and why would they want to?
  • Exhibit B made my ovaries shrivel.
  • Who’s that gay bloke standing next to the giant woman?

Some might fear that the lack of compassion and respect shown in this post might cost Heartiste any chance of being nominated for the Vox Day Mutual Respect Award from The Vox Day Center for Mutual Respect. However, I would observe that the metric for the Vox Day Mutual Respect Award given out by The Vox Day Center for Mutual Respect is “showing compassion and respect” for one’s “fellow man”, and therefore, due to the subject’s observable lack of any identifiable signs of actual manhood, it would not be correct to hold this post against le Chateau.

Thank you for caring.

This is what Zero Fucks looks like

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Pro tip: if you write me telling me you’re tired of me writing about politics, expect a response along the line of “I don’t fucking care.”


John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Pointed out to me a certain racist failure is still desperately trying to prove he’s more popular than I am. Well, with assholes, certainly.


James S.A. Corey ‏@JamesSACorey 
How come you get all the cool enemies?


John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Well, if by “cool” you mean “sad little bigoted manchildren, wailing disconsolately at the indifference of others”: just luck.


Edward Trimnell ‏@EdwardTrimnell
John Scalzi, studiously ignoring Vox Day. Lol.

MAGA Thermite ‏@SirThermite
It’s telling how Gamma 0 isn’t content anymore with calling @voxday a racist, has to lie about him being a failure

Just a reminder that John Scalzi is so successful, and cares so little about what other people think, that he told Lightspeed Magazine in 2010 that Whatever was getting more than 2 million pageviews per month when it was actually getting 409,745. As it is written, SJWs always lie. The first funny thing – and I would have spotted this if I’d been paying attention at the time – is that later that year, he reported 5,131,194 pageviews for the entire year. Be it lying, political analysis, or writing science fiction, he is a mediocrity.

It’s true that McRapey gives zero fucks, but about the truth, not about what you think of him. He cares very much indeed about that. And if you’re here reading this, you are probably already aware that John Scalzi says you’re an asshole. See: Third Law of SJW.

Speaking of the Laws of SJW, the second funny thing is that McRapey is still trying to preserve his narrative about my being a failure when Castalia House now sells more books than he does and November’s VP-only traffic was 3,446,312 pageviews, which happens to be 3.3 times more than Whatever’s very best month ever back in May 2012. Scalzi has been in decline ever since, as his site traffic and Google Trends and flat number of Twitter followers all demonstrate.

I’m not trying to prove I’m more popular than he is. I am conclusively proving it, using the very metric that he dishonestly used to create a false media narrative of his own popularity. Far from being desperate, I am distinctly amused at his complete inability to admit the observable reality; Gamma pride is truly a thing to behold. And once his attempt to rip off Isaac Asimov fails to take him to the next level, again, it’s back to the coal mines of the midlist for poor McRapey. His readers know the truth, of course, even as they rush to smooth his ruffled feathers.

Fledgist ‏@Fledgist
What matters is not the roar of the world but the love of your family & the affection of your friends. You’ve got that in spades.

Or, you know, maybe not.


John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
When retweeting things, try to be better than your racist aunt forwarding bullshit she found on Facebook. It’s easier than you think.

3.1 million

For nearly 10 years, I didn’t think much about the traffic statistics, until in 2012, a few Scalzi fans began trying to taunt me with McRapey’s supposedly massive traffic at Whatever. (Key word: supposedly). So, it now gives me a sense of satisfaction every time a new high-water mark is reached. October 2016 marks the first time I’ve hit three times the all-time peak for the former most popular blog in science fiction, which was recorded in May 2012.

Of course, it’s around 6x Whatever‘s current traffic, but no one cares about that anymore.

Anyhow, October set a new traffic records for both VP – 2,615,169 Google pageviews – and VP+AG – 3,112,416. It will be close, but it now looks like the combined blog total will exceed 30 million in 2016, up considerably from last year’s 20,776,969 pageviews.

A lot of that is the election, of course, but there was no dropoff at all after November 2012, so perhaps the newly come Ilk will become the foundation for the next ramp up to 50 million annually. Who knows?

There is a deeper point to this post, however, beyond the petty ball-spiking. Past performance can be indicative of future performance, but that is not always the case. For example, I have a pretty good statistical model that predicts traffic growth with a reasonable degree of accuracy. It can be so good that it predicted 1,990,883 pageviews in January 2016. The actual number was 1,982,034. That’s precision to within half of one percent! It also predicted 27,682,865 pageviews for 2016; we’re presently at 24,247,801 with two months to go. Not bad, right?

That, you see, is why I take dh very seriously when he discusses the election in terms of the historical poll analyses. His perspective is not irrelevant. Far from it. On the other hand, one also has to be aware that these statistical trends, however reliable they tend to be, are not determinative. One also has to pay attention to potential outliers, and recognize the scenarios when they are likely to be in play.

For example, my impressively precise traffic model predicted 2,019,930 pageviews in October 2016. The actual result, previously mentioned, turned out to be 54 percent higher.

TL;DR: Thank you for visiting. Feel free to join the discourse. And please to enjoy the incipient Trumpslide.

Buyer’s remorse

I have to admit, I’m vastly amused at the thought of what must have gone through Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s mind when he read this little bloviation from his star author. Or better yet, the mind of the executive at Macmillan who has to defend Tor’s underperformance in 2016 to the Germans.

This year I’ll publish/have published a novella, stories in three anthologies, a short story collection and a video game. Not a bad year.

No, not bad. But of course, that’s really not what Tor Books pays him for. What appears to be missing there is the very small matter of a novel. Or two. That being said, I had better not cast too many stones, lest I find myself again addressed as “Vox RR Day” come January. Hey, I’m working on it!

Regardless, it’s a simple fact that the mainstream publishers are now in decline.

Financial reports for the first half of 2016 from five major publishers showed that none of the companies had a sales increase in the first half of the year; HarperCollins had the best top-line performance, with only a minor sales decline compared to the first six months of 2015. Earnings fell at three publishers in the period and rose at two. Though sales of print books have stabilized, all five reporting publishers said sales of e-books fell in the first six months of 2016 compared to the January–June 2015 period.

Sales at Penguin Random House were down nearly 11 percent, at -10.7 percent. HarperCollins did well to remain essentially flat for the first two quarters. And it’s only going to get worse, as independent publishers, self-publishers, and Kindle Unlimited continue to take an increasing share of the market.

Remember, publishing is not a zero-sum game, it is a NEGATIVE-SUM game. Because the market is shrinking, every sale Castalia makes represents more than one previous-year sale lost to the gatekeepers. And if you think they’re acting crazy now, just wait until Barnes & Noble goes down and takes one or more of the big publishers with them.

Cernovich’s bitch

The decline and fall of John Scalzi, quantified:

105k: Mike Cernovich’s Twitter followers
104k: John Scalzi’s Twitter followers

2,829,755: peak monthly pageviews* for “the most despised man in science fiction”

1,013,049: peak monthly pageviews for “the most popular blog in science fiction”
Sure, he’s still sells more books… for now.
* at the current rate, this will be surpassed at the end of this month.

Second Law of SJW in action

SJWs always double down.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Oh and apparently, yesterday, according to leading racists, I called for the genocide of white folks! Sorry, whites. We had a good run.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
LOOK PEOPLE I JUST FOUND OUT I CALLED FOR WHITE GENOCIDE I DIDN’T KNOW I WOULD HAVE TO PLAN THE WHOLE THING TOO


John Scalzi ‏@scalzi 
I mean, this is my schedule today:


7am-9: Novel writing
10am: Post big idea
12pm: Phone meeting
1pm: WHITE GENOCIDE
2pm: Nap



It’s packed!

But this was definitely my favorite.

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Just read a hilarious thread on Facebook, of people slagging an imaginary version of me. I “liked” the original post, of course.

Of course. See, when you “like” people insulting you, and when you pretend to laugh at their contempt, that totally negates it. SECRET KING WINS AGAIN! If you want to know why it’s so easy to predict the behavior of SJWs like McRapey, read SJWAL.

Someone made a few alterations. I tweeted it to #BlackLivesMatter. This promises to be amusing.

UPDATE: In a comment on his own post which consists of a series of tweets concerning his humorous approach to genocide, John Scalzi would like to set a few things straight.

Since inevitably some poor humorless racist schmuck still won’t understand:

1. Hey! I’m not for genocide of any sort!

2. As such, no argument for genocide, “white” or otherwise, is an acceptable one.

3. If one were to make an argument for the genocide of white people, pointing at the existence of horrible white racist schmucks and all the horrible white racist schmucky things they do would likely be the best possible grounding for that argument.

4. However, “best” does not mean “good,”; it would still not be an acceptable argument for the genocide of white people.

5. Nor would I personally make it.

6. You dim horrible racist fucks.

And if these horrible racist schmucks are still unconvinced after that point, fuck ’em, it’s not my fault their heads are full of misfiring neurons.

With that out of the way:

a) Mallet is out and I will err on the side of Malleting.

b) If you’re planning to make this a Very Serious Thread about genocide, white or otherwise, you’re probably not going to have a good time. Likewise if you demand other people do your Racism 101 for you. May I suggest that the topics for this thread are, one, the eminently mockable concept of white genocide as thought upon by racist schmucks, two, my ineptness at it, three, pointing and laughing at racists. If you try to make it about something else you are probably not going to have a good time, and I will likely mock and/or Mallet you for it.

c) If the thread becomes tiresome early — as it might! — I may just simply close it down because I have other things to do today.

Okay, there you go. Have fun.

I don’t know about you, but I can only conclude that he’s racist. And a little bit rapey.