Tag: McRapey

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.

Scalzi endorses white genocide

John Scalzi inexplicably decided today is a good time to virtue-signal his opposition to the Alt-Right. And, while he was at it, to the white race.

“‘Alt-Right’ happened when white male nerds realized the Internet lets them be bigger bullies than the jocks who shoved them into lockers.”
– John Scalzi, 7 September 2016

“OOOOOOH NOOOOOO EVERYTHIIIIINGS TURRRRNING BROOOOOOOOWN”
– John Scalzi, 7 September 2016

“Those concerned about the “extinction” of the white race are the best argument for its demise.”
– John Scalzi, 7 September 2016

Why Worldcon changed the rules

Year: votes (nominations)
2012: 1922 (1101)
2013: 1848 (1343)
2014: 3587 (1923)
2015: 5950 (2112)
2016: 3130 (4032)

The number of nominations rose in 2014 and 2015 due to the appearance of Sad Puppies, then Rabid Puppies. The big influx of Supporting Members began in 2014, when the SJWs, alarmed, gathered the herd to No Award Larry Correia and the rest of the Puppy finalists. They made an even bigger effort in 2015 in response to the Rabid Puppies.

However, their morale suffered a terrible blow when, despite there being nearly four times as many nominations cast in 2016 than in 2012, the Rabid Puppies selected more finalists than the Sad Puppies ever did. While most RP’s didn’t bother getting MidAmericaCon memberships in order to vote, what’s interesting is that over 2,000 SJWs didn’t either.

Anyhow, the first stage is now over. The new award has been established and the Hugo rules have been modified and complicated, as anticipated. Now we’re onto the second stage, which will last longer and promises to be more interesting than the first. RPs, be sure to keep your voting/nomination emails from Sasquan and MidAmericaCon, as you may need them next year if you are neither Brainstorm nor VFM.

We got here one year faster than I thought, as apparently a) we scared them worse than I’d expected and b) it turns out they care a lot more about me than they do about quality science fiction or science fiction history.

I wasn’t surprised that Toni Weisskopf didn’t win last year, but I was surprised that they voted her below No Award. This year, it doesn’t even surprise me a little bit that they would No Award an objectively high-quality work such as Between Light and Shadow or accomplished, highly respected individuals in the field such as Larry Elmore and Jerry Pournelle, who reportedly had the longest book-signing line at Worldcon.

I wonder how many SJWs who were begging for Dr. Pournelle’s signature had previously claimed that he did not merit a Best Editor award with their vote? Do tell us more about how the Hugo Awards concern quality and standing in the field, not SJW-driven politics.

951 No Award
766 Jerry Pournelle

893 No Award
497 Larry Elmore

That says it all about how seriously the awards deserve to be taken by science fiction readers these days. John Scalzi summed up the SF-SJW position rather well in a long diatribe yesterday. It’s rather remarkable how he devotes nearly 1,500 1,887 words to informing the world that absolutely none of it is about me, and somehow manages to do so while giving absolutely zero fucks.

  • What [the man whose blog traffic is now 6x that of the erstwhile “most popular blog in science fiction”] is really doing at this point is trying to mitigate his own inability to have the status and influence he assumed would be his, by pathetically attempting to shoehorn himself into the history of others who have done more, and better, than he has.
  • An active association with [the man who exposed Scalzi as a fraud] is, bluntly, death for your Hugo award chances. I mean, it takes a lot for someone as esteemed in the field as Jerry Pournelle to finish below “No Award” in Hugo voting, and yet, there he is, sixth in a field of five in the category of Best Editor, Short Form.

Translation: Vox Day is totally irrelevant and pathetic and doesn’t matter at all, so don’t you dare to associate with him in any way, shape, or form, or it will kill your career, no one will ever give you a Hugo Award, and everyone will hate you. Please, please, don’t do it!

What a masterpiece of its kind. As it is written, SJWs always lie. Just wait until Mr. ZFG learns what names are risking SJW disapproval to actively associate with Castalia House in 2017. But if an author doesn’t want to associate with the publishing house that is the fastest-growing in the field and pays such high royalties that the much larger publisher who inquired about acquiring it begged me to consider reducing them, that’s certainly their right. We don’t publish SJWs anyhow.

I particularly enjoyed McRapey’s attempt to cling to the original Narrative he’d tried to spin about the nomination of “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” being a devastating mistake on my part.

Rather than being appalled that Tingle had been nominated, the Worldcon community largely embraced him (or whoever Tingle is; no one is really sure). Here was someone who was nominated by a bigot to antagonize other people, who instead allied himself with those folks and was appreciated by them in return.

1508 No Award
659 “Space Raptor Butt Invasion”

Apparently those folks appreciate Mr. Tingle just about as much as they appreciate me. Did I not tell you that would happen despite the SJW’s feigned joy over how terribly funny and brilliant they found Mr. Tingle’s work?

Because, as we know, SJW’s always lie.

UPDATE: Dr. Pournelle is quite clearly crushed, and duly penitent, in consequence of his well-merited rebuke at the hands of Worldcon’s SJWs.

UPDATE: The Reverend 3.0 considers his failed prediction concerning “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” winning Best Short Story:

I was incorrect. And while I’m ready to tuck in and eat my words, it’s interesting to look at where my logic broke down.

My logic was the following:
-Puppies will vote for it because they think it is hilarious, embarrasses the Hugos, and Chuck is one of them.
-Puppy Kickers will vote for it because they think it is hilarious, embarrasses the Puppies, and Chuck is one of them.
-If the two largest blocks vote for it, it can’t lose.

But lo and behold, one of these two voting blocks failed to vote for SRBI and instead propelled Cat Pictures to victory and Noah Ward to second place. One of these two blocks was either lying to itself or lying through its teeth.

My prediction failed, and it failed because one of these two groups said one thing and then did another. So which group is the group of dirty liars? The Puppies? The Kickers? I’m sure the ballot numbers will tell.

Either way, learn from my mistake. Take that group’s tendency to lie into account in the future.

Now, I wonder who might have been lying and putting forth a false Narrative? 

McRapey opines

On the state of science fiction in 2016:

1. I’ll write more about the Hugo tomorrow at home, but the general takeaway of this year’s awards are as follows:

2. The winners this year were generally fantastic and point to the health and quality of the field. Some of the best SF/F ever is here now.

3. Once again, we see that quality wins out over slating for obtuse political purposes.

4. In the case of slating, Hugo voters are not stupid and can discern human shields and cynical attempts to ride on others’ popularity.

5. The “puppies” in 2016 are the useful idiots of a minor racist who uses the Hugos as cheap advertising for his publishing house.

6. The Hugos and administrators should recognize point five and stop pretending this minor racist deserves being treated seriously.

As it is written, SJWs always lie.

More importantly, as per the Third Law of SJW, they always project. Think about point 5 in that regard. Now, whereever would a Tor Books author, particularly one notorious for having introduced public “award pimpage” to the various science fiction awards, have gotten the idea that someone, somewhere, might be using the Hugos as cheap advertising?

I’m certainly not. Castalia House is not making any attempt whatsoever to sell books to the decrepit denizens of Worldcon. We see no point in casting literary pearls before shoggoths.

It’s also amusing to see that McRapey, who built his career on the false pretense of having the most popular blog in science fiction, should declare that the author of the most popular blog in science fiction and the lead editor of the fastest growing publisher in science fiction does not merit being treated seriously. For some reason, that matters to him. Very much.

And yet, it doesn’t matter to me. It makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whether they take me seriously or not. My only concern is to continue finding very good authors and helping them publish excellent, best-selling books. Castalia House will succeed or fail on that basis, and barring a complete collapse of the global economy, on that basis alone.

A new milestone: 2.5 million

I have a good reason to appreciate the material contribution that McRapey and a few of his more rabid fans have made to this site. For the first nine years of the blog, I didn’t pay much attention to my site traffic. The traffic had grown steadily over time, but it never occurred to me to think much of it because most of my readership was at WorldNetDaily and the blog had initially been little more than a place for me to record my passing thoughts and address many similar emails in one fell swoop. I started VP in 2003, but it wasn’t until 2012, when some of Scalzi’s fans began repeatedly mocking the way in which my site traffic compared unfavorably with that of Whatever, that I began looking into the implied connection between Scalzi’s perceived success in the science fiction community and his reported traffic.

As Verne, a commenter at AG, put it: “Once upon a time there was a low level geek (gamma) who managed to get himself a wee bit of power and bragging rights by way of the stupid Whatever blog and a position in a Sci/Fi org that no rational man would seemingly want. He used that power to tear into man of greater station and talent. That better man had up to that time not taken his blog and many other forms of networking seriously. A angry bear was awakened and has been steamrolling all in his way ever since.”


That’s more or less how it went, although I’m not angry at anyone about any of this. I realize many people won’t believe it, but until 2013, the 10th year of the blog, I didn’t care much about its traffic because I simply didn’t believe it had any particular significance beyond simple vanity. After all, what difference did it make if you had 5,000 pageviews in a month or 250,000 when WorldNetDaily had 5 million, the Atlanta Journal/Constitution had 19 million, and your column appeared weekly in both? I have to conclude that my very modest amount of success in the old media and old publishing worlds misled my perception of the digital media’s importance.

That’s why I was late to ebooks, why I was late to Twitter, and why I was very late to the utility of site traffic. It’s also why I rather cluelessly ran for SFWA office.

But just because I’m late to the party doesn’t mean that I’m stupid, or that I’ve lost my ability to see things that most people can’t. As chronicled in SJWs Always Lie, once I started paying attention, I very quickly recognized that McRapey was significantly exaggerating his traffic. More importantly, I also came to understand why he was lying about it and how he was effectively using public perception of that “extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website”.

And I was downright astonished to discover that my blogs were already seeing very similar traffic, as I learned after reading McRapey’s 2012 summary that, as  it later turned out, proved to be the high water mark for Whatever.

That looks genuinely impressive at first glance.  8.165 million views!  But the last number made me do a double-take. And then it made me laugh. You see, Google Analytics also tracks Vox Popoli and Alpha Game. Those two blogs happened to combine for 719,700 views in December.  719,700, if I recall correctly, happens to be a little bit more than 718,000.  Nor is it an anomaly, as that was actually down from 745,857 in November.  This inspired me to look further into the matter of comparative blog traffic.

Of course, it’s not much of a comparison anymore, as Whatever now averages less than 500,000 pageviews a month while Alpha Game alone sees more than that. July 2016 saw record traffic for both VP and AG, with 2,078,989 pageviews for the former, 510,093 for the latter, and a total of 2,589,082 for the month. It may not be a competition, but as long as Whatever exists, it will serve a useful purpose for me as both a goad and a scalp.

So, 2.5 million monthly pageviews, what does that matter? Isn’t that just vanity and ego-stroking? Well, no. That’s the same mistaken perception that I used to harbor. The truth is that engagement is the social media fuel upon which the engine of Internet influence runs, and pageviews are how engagement is measured. That’s why so many people try to fake engagement by click-baiting and buying fake followers and posting pictures of cute girls in bikinis and videos of cute animals doing cute things. If gold can be adulterated and inflated, then it should be no surprise that pageviews can be as well. As we know, they can even be entirely fictitious pageviews that are invented in interviews.

But as with gold, only pageviews based on genuine engagement matter in the end. And the sort of pageviews one receives on an old-fashioned, text-heavy site are 24-carat quality. I’d much rather have my readers, and their 2.5 million pageviews, than 10 million pageviews of the sort produced by the readers of a Gawker-style clickbait site. I think VP will eventually reach 10 million monthly pageviews, and it will probably do so sooner than any of us reasonably expect. But we’ll do it for real or we won’t do it at all.

Castalia House and DevGame and Brainstorm and Big Fork and other projects that you haven’t heard about yet all exist because there is a material difference between 5,000 pageviews and 2.5 million pageviews per month. That is why this milestone matters, and that is why I am pleased to be able to celebrate it with you today.

Two million page views monthly

VP just hit its two millionth pageview for the month. I’ll have a more detailed report once the final numbers are in, but it’s a particularly satisfying milestone in light of this section from SJWs Always Lie:

The discrepancies were starting to accumulate, and the increasingly wordy, increasingly elaborate defensiveness on Scalzi’s part made me increasingly certain that he was lying. But how to prove it to everyone else?

Then it occurred to me that anyone who was willing to shamelessly exaggerate in an interview with the New York Times was probably not doing so for the first time. In my experience, most people who are self-promoters never stop promoting themselves. They have a tendency to talk themselves up, and they will often exaggerate when they have no need to do so. Given that the New York Times is at the top of the U.S. cultural heap, I figured the chances were very high that Scalzi had similarly inflated his traffic in previous interviews with other reporters. And, sure enough, I found an interview he had given almost exactly three years before to Erin Stocks at a science fiction magazine called Lightspeed.

Anything you ever wanted to know about science fiction writer John Scalzi you can find online at the public and rather opinionated blog that he’s kept since 1998, Whatever.scalzi.com/. His bio page holds all the usual info—education, past jobs, present jobs, books published, awards won—and is wrapped up with the tongue-in-cheek coda: “For more detailed information, including a complete bibliography, visit the Wikipedia entry on me. It’s generally accurate.” But spend a little more time browsing, and you’ll learn that beyond the dry stats and quippy bon mots, there’s more to John Scalzi and his writing than meets the eye. For one thing, his blog gets an extraordinary amount of traffic for a writer’s website–Scalzi himself quotes it at over 45,000 unique visitors daily and more than two million page views monthly.

—“Interview: John Scalzi”, Lightspeed, September 2010 (Issue 4)

Extraordinary indeed. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Three years before the New York Times interview that struck me as anomalous, John Scalzi had been publicly claiming to have very nearly the same number of readers, as well as an absolutely impossible number of pageviews. And how could Whatever possibly have had “more than two million page views monthly” in September 2010 when he later reported 5,131,194 pageviews for the whole of the year?

Alpha Game is seeing record traffic as well, and will hit 500,000 monthly pageviews later today. Thanks to all of you who made this possible by stopping by, and to those who have helped make it a destination by adding to the discourse.

I’d say on to 3 million, but I’ve been hanging around Cernovich too much and you know how he is about always thinking big. On to 10 million.

John Scalzi, political pundit

McRapey analyzes the Republican National Convention. Incompetence ensues.

The convention, generally, was the worst-run major political convention in a generation, and that should scare you. How is Trump going to manage an entire country when he can’t even put on a four-day show? (The answer, as we found out this week, is that he has no intention of managing the country at all; he plans to foist the actual work onto his poor VP while he struts about as bloviating figurehead.) Trump lost control of his convention and his message twice, once with Melania Trump’s clumsy plagiarism of Michelle Obama, which ate up two days of news cycles before Trump’s people found someone to be their chump for it, and then second with Ted Cruz, that oleaginous lump of hungering self-interest, who rather breathtakingly took to the stage of a nominating convention in order not to endorse Trump, in the most public way possible. That bit of low-rent Machiavellianism ate up another day of news cycles.

In the end, all the GOP convention has coming out of it are two massive failures of message control and Trump’s cataclysmic nomination speech.

And Nate Silver of 538 observing that Trump’s chances of winning the election have rising 40 points from a month ago. And Mr. Trump taking the lead in several national polls, including those from CNN and the LA Times. But while we’re on the subject of badly-run conventions, have we ever seen a national party chairman resign the day before the start of the convention?

Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Scalzi?

But that’s the Trump shtick: He doesn’t have policies or positions or plans

No, no positions at all. And who could possibly know what his policies on tax reform, healthcare reform, immigration, foreign policy, and trade could be? Of course, one should keep in mind that John Scalzi is an SJW, and what is it that SJWs always do? I seem to recall someone wrote a book about that.

Trump is still not likely to win — after everything, he’s still trailing Clinton.

Only in the polls taken a month ago. He’s doing rather well in the new ones, so much so that the media is now attempting to discount the very sort of “convention bounce” that we were previously told doesn’t exist anymore.

However, the best dismissal of John Scalzi’s worst attempt to engage in political punditry since his famous “I’m a rapist” post is from a Hillary Clinton supporter, who notes a certain irony about McRapey’s attack on the Republican candidate for President.

In a post about how Donald Trump’s modus operandi is to scare people into voting for him, I count *ten* instances where you tell us that Trump (and the Republican party more broadly) should scare/terrify us, that they’re dangerous, that they’ll bring disaster/tragedy to the country, and so forth.
– Brian Greenberg