Death Is Bad

Wow, where to begin?

The thing that sticks out more than anything else is the award for Best Related Work. Because everything up until that award wasn’t too badly vandalized by the Puppies. Best Related Work was the first big pile of crap that was nothing but awful Puppy trash. This was the big turning point – if this didn’t get No Award, it was likely nothing would. So I was tense and actually on the edge of my seat. The cheer that went up when No Award was announced was viseral. I was part of it. Things would be OK.

I sat in the Literary Beer with Neil Clarke, which was really fun. The man had great stories about his heart attack, the Clarkesworld Stalker, and the amount of sweat that went into deciding whether to publish Spar, among other things. He also talked about how when he helped write the criteria for Semi-Pro Magazine category he deliberately helped set it up so that Clarkesworld would soon be “Weighted Out” of the catagory (boxing term, meaning they were too big to qualify anymore). I found that rather noble of him. It’s hard to disqualify yourself for a catagory while you still try to hold down a full-time day job as well!

My first WorldCon I didn’t go to any Koffee Klatches or Literary Beers, as I was scared as hell about what I’d say around someone famous like that. I’m super glad I went to two this year, and I plan to go to them again next year.

Speaking of things learned from my first con – find a con spouse! My first time I hung around with Anaea Lay a lot, and took her as my date to the award ceremony. This year my con spouse was Danielle, we checked in a few times, shared several meals, and went to the ceremony together. (As a note – for those who aren’t familiar with the term “work spouse”, a “con spouse” is just someone you share a lot of time with, absolutely nothing sexual or romantic about it). It made everything easier and more enjoyable, and she managed to “track down” (ie: coincidentally bump into) one of the Hugo Awards, so we got to TOUCH THE HUGO! And take pictures with it!! Aaaaaaah!

My hotel was baller as hell, with AMAZING service!! I will try to always stay at Holiday Inn’s, I recommend them highly. When I tried to book my hotel I was dissapointed that the con hotel was already booked up, but now I feel I dodged a bullet. That thing was built at the nadir of American Architecture. The hallways are cramped, the roof is no more than six inches above my head, and the whole place looks like it came out of the 60s. Ugh. My Holiday Inn, OTOH, looked like a freakin’ castle, and was perfect and accomidating in every way.

One of the HIGHLIGHTS was getting to meet Seth Dickinson in person! Yes, the guy whose writing I ADORE and can’t stop talking about. We had dinner together, and drinks too, I got to talk with him for like FOUR HOURS across two days!! We talked fiction, his stories, rationality, the Rationalist movement (Anaea was there for most of this too, she’s not as enthusiastic about the rationality scene, so that was an interesting conversation. That’s her on my right), pets, and so forth. OMG it was so cool! If you can buy your idol dinner and drinks, do it, it’s so worth it! Insights from Seth #1: If a sentence doesn’t work, the problem is generally a few paragraphs up. Good fiction progresses naturally, and if you can’t get it to flow right, you probably messed up something upstream. Insight from Seth #2: Blindsight is proof that the SF genre of fiction is necessary. Most stories can be told in any genre, even most SF/F could be recast as Earthfic with some work. But Blindsight could only be done in SF, and it is an essential work.

I got to walk through a cool park whenever I went to/from my hotel. The entire con area was a nature wonderland, very asthetically pleasing! :) The nearby forest fires were a nuisance though. On the third day the smoke was so thick that not only was there a permanent haze, but the entire city smelled like the inside of a smokering room. It got to be nauseating, I had trouble eating dinner that day. A few times there was ash in the air, and yes, it even got into the convention center. It was really striking on the flights in/out, when you looked from your airplane window and saw smoke covering the landscape for hundreds of miles in all directions. Damn.

Oh, another thing I learned from previous cons that I put into practice in Spokane – before you do anything else, walk the entire con from front to back. Get a lay of the land, so you know where things are, especially in relation to each other. Schedule 30 minutes for this (more if you need it). I swear it’s one of the most important steps to enjoying any con, and well worth your time.

I went to both the Brandon Sanderson and John Scalzi readings, where they read from upcoming works. You guys are in for a treat in the near future. :) In addition to reading, John joked with the audience a bit and was all around charming and hilarious. Brandon talked about how he writes and some history, which was fascinating. Insights from Brandon #1: When you write, the novel/story is not the product you are creating. The product you are creating is a better author. You are upgrading you. The story/novel is a side-effect of this process. If it sells, great. If not – no worries. There will be more such side-effects as you keep working on yourself.

Pic stolen shamelessly from Rachael Acks
I went to the Business Meeting on Saturday. It’s a three-hour commitment right in the middle of peak con hours! I thought it would be a chore, but considered it an important duty. Boy was I wrong! This was among the highlights of the con for me! It is fascinating to watch the process happen. It feels like you are in a small Puritan village during the early colonial period. All the adults have gathered and are doing the best they can to keep society running because this is all the government there is. We are the only adults around, and who the hell thought that was a good idea? :) The strict adherence to Parlimentary Rules was charming, and I felt like I was turely part of a small community family. People were jovial. Apparently there are “regulars” who are well known for coming to these year after year after year. There was an informal Bingo game that listed the names of the 14 most common speakers, Whenever one stood up to make an amendment or challenge or speak for/against a motion their name would be marked off (and 5-in-a-row gets Bingo, of course). One person who spoke multiple times about the “YA Hugo” proposal was put onto the YA Hugo Committee by executive order. :) It felt like what governments SHOULD be. If only humanity could live in groups of a few thousand, rather than the hundreds-of-millions that nations consist of. /wistful

Most votes were done by raising of hands and estimation by the chair (most votes weren’t close and a count wasn’t needed). When a count was requested, everyone For stood up and counted off one by one as they sat down. Then repeat for Against. It was terribly exciting! Especially when I was sitting right next to the proposer of one of the motions (who was also the committee chair! Recused himself for that particular motion and sat down next to me) and voted against him! Later there was a presentation of EPH (E Plubris, Hugo) which cleared it up greatly for me and moved me from the “Voting against it, too complicated” to “This is brilliant!! I’m all for it!” camp. I hope they make that presentation available online at some point.

Anyway, the Business Meeting was great, and I encourage everyone to go! The sense of community was palpable. I only went for one (there were four, one each day Thurs-Sun), but I’m glad I did, and wish I had time to go to others as well. My friend Rachael Acks live-blogged all four days at her blog, here.

I think it’s awesome that gender-bent Immortan Joe cosplay has become a thing. :)

[No pic here of Panel or Scott Andrews, sadly. I am a dumb.]
The Future-Of-Short-Story-Publishing panel was fantastic. Especially because they had an old-timer (Mike Resnic) moderating the panel. He brought in stark contrast, when he spoke several times of “these things are run by Profit-and-Loss” and so forth. I asked about this, because I knew for a fact that at least half the panel still had dayjobs(!) and one of them is set up as a non-profit because it’s the only way it can afford to run. These are works of passion, not capitalist endevours. IMHO. The panel itself was good, but as I sat in the front row I was now able to recognize John Joseph Adams and Scott Andrews on sight. This came in SUPER HANDY when I went to the airport to fly back home on Sunday. I saw Scott Andrews sitting at my gate, waiting for the same flight! Not talking to anyone or reading anything either. So, after about a minute of working up my nerve, I went over to talk to him. And OMG we talked for 20 minutes!! It was fantastic! He explained Science Fantasy to me, we talked SF and podcasts and several other things. And it turns out he is ALSO a huge fan of Seth Dickinson! Hell yeah!!

Anyway, I had one of the best vacations of my life. I can’t wait for next year!

Lets get the awards themselves out of the way first. As you’ve all heard by now, the Puppies were shut out. The community managed to successfully defend themselves at the first level. Congrats to all of us, I’m proud. :)

I had thought it possible there would be some disruption of the awards. Not necessarily anything physical, but maybe booing or chanting or yelling, which would slow things, stop the proceedings, and need to be dealt with. Before I arrived in Spokane I had been half-expecting it. There was not a peep. If there were any puppy supporters in the audience they were well behaved. I will admit that I am partially impressed that they managed to keep their civility about them. The entire thing went off without a hitch.

But by the time I actually walked into the auditorium, I no longer expected the Puppies to be a problem, because this was just the continuation of their entire week-long trend.

Long time readers may be aware I’m a bit of a drama-chaser. I don’t like it personally in my life, cuz who has the time for that shit? But I love to watch it. So I was seeking it out. I made many of my panel choices based on things I thought may draw puppy ire. I went to John Scalzi’s reading, which was hilarious and delightful. There was not a single bit of contention. No boos or hisses or people standing up to ask jerk questions. Maybe this is because John Scalzi is razor sharp and intimidating to anyone without genius-levels of charisma and IQ, and they were scared to speak out. Maybe they were intimated by such a large room full of huge Scalzi fans. I don’t know.

I went to the panel on “Writing About Controversies” which was unofficially THE panel to discuss the Sad Puppy/Rabid Puppy situation. I thought maybe here, of all places, someone would stand up to ask a challenging question during the Q&A. Nothing.

I went to a handful of social justice panels, thinking maybe someone would boo or challenge there. The rooms were more intimate, the audience smaller, and the panelists fairly low-level and unthreatening. I left early out of boredome in several cases.

I attended the business meeting where the rules changes were discussed to address the puppy problem. Here, I thought, is a perfect place for them to strike. It is a very formal, palimentary system (more on this later, it was fascinating!), and it would have been pretty easy to sabotage. I saw one issue run off the table just because it was contentious and there was enough bickering and debate that time ran out on it. A group of less than a dozen puppy-supporters could have thrown a serious monkey wrench in the whole thing simply by exploiting rules without doing anything against the letter of the law (as they like to do). They could have tried continually calling points of order, or offering amendments, debating rulings, objecting to proceedures, etc. They could have run out the clock on everything. I’m sure there’s some way of dealing with this, but it would have gummed up the works if they did it smartly. Nothing at all. It’s like they weren’t even there.

I know there were some around. I ran into one at my hotel’s breakfast bar, and we had a good little discussion. It was very civil, and we went away with respect for each other as human beings. I talked to a couple friends who also ran into a puppy or two. But all in all, it was like they weren’t there. Turns out they are cowards in real life, and only strike out at others when they can do so comfortably from behind the safety of their keyboards.

One may think “Isn’t it possible they are just good people, who don’t want to disrupt a party and ruin the days of other people for no reason? Why are you Saying they are cowards, rather than that they are civilized people?” Nay, I reply. When they can hide behind screens and keyboards, and don’t have to see the faces of the people they are hurting, they are more than happy to destroy someone’s day. They are *gleefull* about it. They cackle about how good it feels to see an anthill and start stomping it (which is a direct quote from a puppy commenter on my blog, I’m not making shit up). I don’t do Twitter myself, but I hear you can see all sorts of abuse on there right now.

But lets grant that those online comments are from the worst fringes of the movement. The fact remains that the puppy supporters were excited to vote a slate so they could hijack the Hugos for their self-aggrandizement. And as I predicted in “Why Vandals?” none of them bothered to show up for the actual party. If the party was left just to them, they’d have a nearly empty convention hall and no one to run it. They do not care about the con, or the people who attend it. They didn’t attend the business meeting to try to make things better. They didn’t put forward any bids to host the 2018 WorldCon. That they didn’t try to further mar the convention by ruining things in person isn’t a mark of civility, it’s simply the modus operandi for internet cowards.

It really dawned on me just how worthless the Puppies are when I went to the business meeting, and during the watching of the fan-recognition part of the award ceremony. These are people, later on in their years, who have been SF/F fans for significantly longer than I’ve even been alive. They’ve spent *decades* of work putting together these conventions. They are dedicated, and in love. They aren’t the authors, they don’t get the accolades themselves. They’re just passionate about SF. I really came to realize how much WorldCon is by and for the fans. I was very disappointed that more puppies didn’t come to the con in person. I was very disappointed that ALL the puppies didn’t come to the con in person! They would have seen that joy and passion for themselves. Maybe that is part of the reason why the puppy supporters who did come didn’t boo or shout or try to disrupt anything. They saw the love and the passion for themselves, and couldn’t bring themselves to be assholes any more. The ones who stayed home, safe behind their keyboards – they are the ones who will continue to be dicks. Because they were cowards, and wouldn’t come to see what they were vandalizing in person. Assholery feeds on cowardice, which leads to further assholery, in a neat little circle. It’s fitting.

The true realization of just how awful they are didn’t hit until the nomination stats were released afterwards. Before that point, it was just a theoretical “Man, I wonder how the year would have been different.” Afterwards, you could see exactly which stories were obstructed by the Puppy’s spite. Which authors were denied the recognition for great work. There are some truely fantastic stories that would have gotten nominations if not for the Puppy’s vandalism. Most tragically, a story by Eugie Foster would have received a nomination. Eugie Foster died tragically last year. By all accounts, she was an amazing person and a great writer. Who knows if she would have won? But now she’ll never have the memorium of “Hugo-nominated author” that she should have received. Because of the Puppy’s butthurt. I’ve tried to engage them before, and be reasonable. After today I’ll go back to that. But for today, I’m allowing myself to be angry. Fuck those guys.

The last few days everyone in Hugo-ville has been in a tizzy about Lou Antonelli contacting the police in Spokane. I’ve seen it referred to as a SWATing. Guys… no. Chill the fuck out. A SWATing is when the SWAT team actually breaks into your house. It’s terrible for a number of reasons, but primary among them the fact that American police are notoriously reckless and an innocent person could be killed. This is a SWATing. What Lou did isn’t SWATing. He wrote a letter, asking for extra police protection at a public event.

Yes, he’s crazy, and he used paranoid language that shows how off-the-deep-end he is. But police do occasionally get such letters from crazy people, it’s not a big deal. And let’s be real for a second – wouldn’t we all feel a bit better with extra security around this year? I’ve heard similar worries from the non-Puppies (called Happy Hippogriffs from here on out for brevity) – they’re also scared that the Puppies fans are dangerously emotional and a few lunatics on the fringe might try to start trouble. I’ve had this expressed to me in private, and seen it online as well. We’re all a bit nervous. Lou just had the misfortune of letting his fear show in public, and targeting the Master of Ceremonies with lunatic accusations while doing so. Cut the guy some slack.

Everyone is quoting the Aug 1 episode of the Superlative Livestream. This is a roundtable discussion by a number of Puppies & Sympathizers, and I think very few people have actually listened to it, because there’s some far more interesting stuff in there! I’ve now listened to it, so you don’t have to. ;) Here’s some highlights.

At ~27:40 someone complains about how many people “shelled out forty bucks just to vote a spoiler vote”, which at first I thought showed crazy amounts of obliviousness. The entire Puppy movement is just one big backlash of the aggrieved, uniting to shell out forty bucks for the satisfaction of casting a spoiler vote! That is their raison d’etre! And now they’re trying to take the moral high-ground, saying that’s dirty pool? Then I realized it was John C Wright talking, and I laughed. The man knows exactly what he’s doing, he just has more chutzpah than anyone currently writing. :)

An interesting insight into the Puppies’ view of us: at ~1:17:25 one complains that “the thing with a lot of these people is that they don’t know people of faith”. Which… wow. Is the problem really that the Puppy voters simply don’t know any Hippogriffs? How else could you imagine that the Hippogriffs don’t know any people of faith? A large portion of them are people of faith! Of the remainder, I guarantee close to 100% know people of faith. We live in America, the most religious first-world country on the planet. It’s nigh impossible to NOT know someone of faith. We are all very much acquainted with people of faith, and the fact that you think we aren’t makes me suspect you’ve been being told some very interesting stories about us.

He then goes on to say that this makes having a chaplain protagonist “non-PC.” I don’t understand how this follows, even in the abstract. If any Puppy is reading this, and agrees with his sentiment, can you clarify what he means?

The same Puppy at ~1:20:15 says that he lives in Texas where they “are very different” because “you don’t have to apologize if you mention God or you say “God-bless-you” when someone sneezes”. Again, I want to know where the hell he’s getting his opinions about the outside world. Generally, mentioning God is not something anyone apologizes for. I mean sure,  it may be considered rude to start arguing Religion and/or Politics depending on the situation, but that’s normal social convention. There’s an old saying about it. That’s just not starting shit at the dinner table. Simply mentioning your God is never something I’ve seen anyone have to apologize for – more often than not it meets with approval.

But seriously, the BIG kicker here is his assertion that anywhere in the US someone would have to apologize for saying “God-bless-you.” That’s ludicrous, to the point that I wouldn’t have believed a Puppy had made that claim if I hadn’t heard it with my own ears. It doesn’t even have religious connotations anymore! That he thinks there are places where you’d have to apologize for saying that means his view of people who are outside his group has been so twisted and distorted that we must be little more than baby-eating mutants! He feels that his in-group is so persecuted outside of his enclave, that the outside world would turn on him for a simple wish of health after a sneeze! NO WONDER the Puppies are so happy to part with $40 to spoil the award party of the enemy side! They have a conception of us as truly awful people. This is the thing I was talking about in Defense Against The Dark Arts. What kind of person thinks it’s ok to distort the worldview of those who respect his opinion to turn them on their fellow citizens in this way? Ugh.

Which brings me to John C Wright. I kinda love this guy. He’s extremely intelligent, and well-spoken, and he has this wonderful, rich voice. He’d make such an amazing Quirrell. And he is *passionate*, which I really admire. I loved it when he was crazy Libertarian, and I still love it now that he’s crazy Catholic. This guy does not give one fuck about what his opposition thinks, because they are wrong. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool Warrior, and he’s amazing to watch. Have I mentioned that I like to watch that kind of thing? I loved reading PZ Myer’s blog for the same reason. Intelligent, passionate, and a warrior. PZ would be what the Puppies call a “Social Justice Warrior” (SJW). John C Wright is the right-wing equivalent. He is absolutely a Conservative Justice Warrior (CJW?), and his fiction screams it. Hell, HE screams it, he doesn’t hide it for a second. He starts off the livestream acknowledging it! But the real fireworks come near the end, and for some reason I haven’t seen it referenced anywhere else.

Starting at ~1:18:00 John Wright says that “they’re an enemy religion to our religion. They know it.” Followed at ~1:18:45 with “They worship Moloch by means of abortion, and they worship Baphomet by means of sodomy.” He’s obviously talking in metaphor, but damn, that is some awesome metaphoring! That’s straight-up biblical. And it’s refreshingly honest. None of this namby-pamby bullshit about “You can say God-bless-you without apologizing for it.” Jesus, that argument is just plain sad, it crumbles as soon as anyone bothers to spend five freakin’ minutes with the opposition. But the claims that we support access to abortion, and we’re cool with sodomy? Entirely true. You think those things are bad, we don’t. That’s something real. That’s something worth engaging. Huzzah to Wright, for cutting past the bullshit and getting right to the beating heart of the divide. You, sir, have my respect. In the odd way that one respects a strong opponent.