Patch by Lee Madison
It is that time of year again. If you would like to register to vote for the Hugo awards you will need to do so before the end of January. If you participated last time, you are still eligible to nominate this year.
Sad Puppies is a campaign to get authors and artists nominated, who would normally be shunned by the politically motivated Social Justice Warriors who had become an insurmountable voting block. .
Last year I did a big push with several blog posts and cartoons (featuring Wendell as our spokesmanatee) to try to get people who aren’t typical WorldCon attendees to participate. We managed to get people and things despised by SJWs nominated to almost every category. The ensuing public freak out was hilarious and proved my point.
This year I’ve been pretty swamped with one big writing project (1st book coming out October 2015) and a couple other secret projects, but Brad Torgersen has picked up the gauntlet to make up from me being a huge slacker.
The announcement: https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/announcing-sad-puppies-3/
The explanation: https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/why-sad-puppies-3-is-going-to-destroy-science-fiction/
What you can do to help: https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2015/01/21/how-you-can-aid-the-valiant-sad-puppies-3-campaign/
So there you go folks. Enjoy.
For those of you who missed Sad Puppies 2: Rainbow Puppy Lighthouse the Huggening, but would like to see a great example of somebody proving a point, here is a recap of what happened last time:
https://monsterhunternation.com/2014/04/24/an-explanation-about-the-hugo-awards-controversy/
Larry, someone ought to turn all the Sad Puppies comics and Spokesmanatee PSA’s into a graphic novel where all proceeds goes to some good writing cause ;).
You say that we have to be members by the end of the month to vote, but that’s only to nominate. Last year I didn’t get my supporting membership until well after finalists were announced.
Ah, but the nominations are the real game…
Yes, I meant nominating, but getting the nominations in there is what causes all the sputtery SJW outrage. 😀
As Nathan notes, the real scrimmage is in the nominations.
The SJWs have very specific criteria for theirs: they want gay authors, female authors, transexual authors, non-Caucasian authors. AND THIS IS A HARD RULE which they will seldom break.
You can be none of the above, but your book or story must focus on:
Gay characters, female characters, transexual characters, and non-Caucasian characters.
It helps a ton if they are all sad and miserable in some way or another. Because sadness and misery are the only real components of “mature” fiction, according to every MFA program at every podunk college in America. Which is where most of the SJW authors (and many readers) learn their chops these days.
Yup. We’ve fallen a long, long way since Ursula K. Le Guin, George R.R. Martin, and Larry Niven were our best exemplars in this field. A long way.
SAD PUPPIES is trying (up-hill!) to restore a little of the old grandeur.
It’s a bit like the forces of Minas Tirith trying to re-take Osgiliath from the legions of Sauron.
We’re always outnumbered. But we don’t care. Somebody has to fight this fight. It might as well be us.
That Hugo looks mighty limp . . . (narrows eyes). I see what you did there.
I suggest GTA V shows up as an Angry Wolf, Just Cause 4.
I sent the email to register. Although if they find me here, they probably won’t let me sign up. HA!
Has there been any mention of a slate yet?
confusion, despair, hopelessness…
sorry, thought you meant state…
Just a reminder: registering to vote annoys this guy.
“@damiengwalter
Ah yes. Hugo award nomination season. Which group of whacky sci-fi authors will successfully rig the vote this year?”
Poor Damien finally put something on Amazon, a collection of short stories, 2 months ago, and he still has zero reviews. 😀
Speaking of reviews…
You might want to take a look at the reviews of Kaiju Rising on the Barnes and Noble website.
Or maybe not. Pass the brain bleach and the real bleach, please…
But at least he has a loyal Twitter following! 😉
Sorry… I should have added a warning there…
I don’t know if there were ever any legitimate Kaiju Rising reviews on the Barnes and Noble website. But at the moment, the review section seems to be solely composed of a multi-paragraph porn piece, and a bunch of anonymous one-line posts (likely by the person who originally wrote the thing) praising it.
I noticed it a couple of weeks ago, and reported it. But it’s still up. I don’t know whether the website just moves very slowly when someone reports something like that, or whether it’s going to require more pushing to get the thing removed.
So… there needs to be people reporting the nasty pron “review” to get it removed?
Was that a request?
It’s also got Larry’s face next to Peter Cline’s bio.
Walter (and all the SJWs) are a classic example of the Okie from Muskogee appropriation of hippie culture. 10 years after rednecks might try and run over a hippie hitchhiking, rednecks had long hair themselves. The band Alabama all had long hair but their music was still B.J. and the Bear. Suddenly everyone had earrings. Years later everyone had tattoos and blue hair.
Hippies backpack, rednecks take the Carnival Cruise. When a hippie gets to the destination, they’ll try some roast guinea pig and roe. A redneck wants a cheeseburger. There is nothing wrong with being a redneck, unless you think you are in fact “progressive.”
As far as I can tell, Walter went through all the trouble of moving to Thailand and then jogs and sits on Twitter all day. Given the heritage and culture of Thailand, that verges on obscene. When I had an extended stay in Thailand I raised hell literally from one end of the country to the other in ways I can’t even tell you about. After a night of “partying” many a red dawn saw the sun rise between my knees as I slouched against a rock on some beach on some island. When I moved over to Sumatra I did this odd thing called “learning the language” and slept on massive volcanoes, took giant hikes inside supervolcano calderas and took Lord Jim-style boats down jungle rivers no one ever heard of. Walter would be more honest if he wrote a book called “A Cheeseburger in Thailand.” It would at least express some scintilla of self-awareness. You know what you earn. You don’t know what you don’t earn.
Walter is like all SJWs: they want credit for edgy outside-the-box insights but without ever doing a single damn thing to merit that reputation. SJWs talk like they’re world-weary 80 yr. old fish-wives who’ve all been heroin addicts and understand all the great lessons of life. In fact they’re some of the most hopelessly insulated and provincial morons I’ve ever run across. Like all SJWs, Walter’s main talent is arrogance. There is nothing sitting in back of that. He is either too stupid or too scared to go out and explore the platform he has put himself in and which might actually lead him to say a single damn thing worth listening to.
The internet, a hot tub and 40 acres and a dog does not make for insight. Combined with arrogance and a diploma in literary philosophy it makes for overweening preening morons who flog their stupidity as insightful and crap novels as Hugo and Nebula winners. That’s because they’re all sharing cheeseburgers in Thailand instead of stepping outside. Walter may as well be in Luton. One internet coffee shop is much like another.
They let anyone sign up who has a supporting or attending membership for Worldcon 2014, 2015 or 2016. If you’re getting your first supporting membership, (if 2015 is your first year) you have to do it by January 31st to be able to nominate. Nobody is going to check your politics. They honestly don’t care.
As for “the protagonist must be miserable in some way” yeah, sure. Twenty years ago I was writing short stories, and the rule of thumb for “who is the protagonist?” was “who hurts?” Most stories involve a protagonist trying to reach a significant goal–the goal often being to remove some cause for unhappiness. Menolly runs away because her family is depriving her of music, which hurts. Harry Dresden takes on magical detective work because he has no money, which hurts. Miles Vorkosigan starts the Dendarii Mercenaries because he failed the physical requirements for the military academy, which hurts.
It’s a fairly general characteristic of protagonists–it’s how the author gets them moving.
“they honestly don’t care”
…um…quite the hostile response from such apathy, then.
And “having problems”=”self loathing misery” now?
Hold on, to be fair, the organizers and vote counters truly don’t care. Part of SP1 and 2 was me gathering data to audit them, and I found zero evidence that the people administering this were in any way dishonest.
Now the SJW voting block on the other hand, they’ll burn you at the stake.
In tangentially related news…
Wikipedia just dropped the hammer on a several SJWs who were causing problems with the Gamergate article. The troublemakers will no doubt just create new accounts, mitigating the effect somewhat. But this is still big news as Wikipedia seems to almost invariably veer left whenever a right/left opportunity presents itself.
Good on Wikipedia.
It’s worth noting that most GG supporters lean to the left. This isn’t a clear-cut liberal vs. conservative fight. More like Raging intersectionalists vs. classic freedom-loving Liberals and some Conservatives/Libertarians.
For those of you who don’t know, there’s a famous image showing where a wide selection of GG supporters ranked on a two-axis political spectrum — the horizontal axis being the traditional Left vs. Right, and the vertical labeled Authoritarian at the top and Libertarian at the bottom. The overwhelming majority of respondents were in the lower left (left-libertarian) quadrant of the graph, with the lower right (right-libertarian) coming in second.
If you still want to simplify it down to a single political axis, I would suggest the following interpretation. The institutional Left, in the media and academia, have been pulling the Window of Acceptable Opinion further in their direction for decades. The immediate result is that a lot of people who considered themselves moderates, centrists, liberals, even moderate leftists, have suddenly — without budging an inch — found themselves crammed into the Right side of the frame with all of us nasty libertarians and conservatives.