Have a dime, mister--

[bellatrys]

At least, if you don't have a clue to your name, you should really refrain from advertising that fact. For, you know, your own sake.

On a more intelligent note, the newest SFWA Stupidity Outbreak (must be something in the bottled water!) made me aware of Ray Gun Revival, an online 'zine of SF in whose forums I found this link to spiffy hi-res NASA

Comments

[chaoticgoodnik]

Oh, god, the cry of the persecuted white male. To think I used to buy that dude's books as soon as they came out - when they were entertaining enough to justify the expense. :/

Yes, well, I'm saving money myself that way

[bellatrys]

by not having to buy them any more - money I can spend on books by women, and people darker than me, and authors who are !both! - and yes, even some honky dudes too ;)

Are those *harpoons* in your icon?

[bellatrys]

Is that like a perverse "Moby Dick" joke there?

Re: Are those *harpoons* in your icon?

[chaoticgoodnik]

Heh, now I wish it had been. No, those are ceremonial polearms from the Arms & Armor collection at the Philly Museum. This is the only one they seem to have a picture of on their website.

[voxwoman]

I don't get what the whole brouhaha is about. It really looks as if several someones had one too many wildcards in their search routines coupled with overly zealous paranoia about getting sued. It reminds me of when Essex, Middlesex and Sussex counties were blacklisted from "safe search" software because the letters s, e, and x were lumped together and the nannyware couldn't figure out that these are legitimate counties in New Jersey with sizable populations (many of which are schoolchildren that don't need to be protected from their local school, library or municipal websites).

I also don't get your name comment. But I haven't been reading recent books by anyone "new" since I birthed my daughter 13+ years ago. I simply haven't the time - I can't even keep up with my old author list.

The SFWA brouhaha is because their leadership is nuts.

[bellatrys]

This is the same outfit whose last veep came up with the "pixel-stained technopeasant wretches" sneer at writers who give away work for free on the internets. This new veep has had a bee in his bonnet for many years, it turns out, about digital piracy, to the point where he got SFWA to lend him a chunk of money for his antipiracy project, which consisted of, get this, distributing a whole bunch of corrupt e-book sff texts with the hope of thereby disillusioning people and discouraging them from pirating booksI couldn't make this stuff up if I tried, really

Re: The SFWA brouhaha is because their leadership is nuts.

[chaoticgoodnik]

Incidentally, if we can believe Jerry Pournelle, there were ~3 shouldn't-have-been-there items in a list of ~100k items whose removal was requested. (I didn't see the list, so I don't know if we can or not. I note, however, that I'd call what Pournelle is doing in most of his post about it frothing at the mouth.)

While it seems like neither side is really considering the other's perspective (based on the public statements and comments I've seen), I do think Burt's approach was ill-conceived.

Pournelle is an authoritarian paleocon

[bellatrys]

as well as a raving sexist IRL, so his retrograde establishment kneejerkitis shouldn't be any surprise to anyone. At least he's being honest in saying "It's All About The Moola, I Call Dibs!" in his slams of Doctorow, which is more than Hendrix was.

The thing about "neither side considering the others' perspective" is that SFWA very simply claimed legal rights that they did not and do not have, and used these self-proclaimed legal rights to do damage to persons out there, including some of the very people they were claiming to be protecting, like Doctorow. It's like if someone went to my ISP with a C&D and had MY site taken down for plagiarizing both Jane Austen and some author named Philosopher At Large - and then said oh well if you can PROVE you're P@L and that JA isn't under copyright any more, then we'll take it back and let you get it reinstated.

You better believe I'd be there with torches and pitchforks, considering their "side" - which side to stick the pitchfork best in!

[tekanji]

What the hell is wrong with the SF&F community?? Between this and the recent wank about the Eclipse cover (in which I learned that what divides the community is talking about bias rather than the actual bias itself) I just want to run back to my games, where at least I feel I can do something helpful to stop the idiocy.

This is the "Then they fight you" part

[bellatrys]

What people who blithely quote Gandhi on that don't remember is that 1) sometimes the fighting can go on for generations - usually, in fact, 2) even if you do win, it might kill you in the process, even if it doesn't just outlast your lifespan, 3) you might not win for any recognizable value of "win," either. It's not like a Law of Physics, it's just a description of a typical pattern of social dynamics.

Oh, and they will keep on laughing at you even while they are fighting you, because we are verbal animals and mockery is a weapon!

However, their Xtreem Defensiveness Saving Throws are what gives me the greatest hope - that, and the fact that against all the "well just TRUST the Big Boys, 'cause they're/we're BUSINESSMEN and therefore MUST know what they/we are doing" is that *everyone* knows the numbers are bad for the traditional comics and print 'zines, so that pig won't fly.

This is stupidity

[deiseach]

I have no idea how great a proportion of revenue e-publishing generates, nor indeed how big a problem piracy is; however, I'll assume that, of the e-books and such, SF makes up a larger proportion of what is bought (seeing as how spiffy technology goes with the field, so to speak