LibertyCon sounds interesting, and next year they won't be so close in time to the northeast filk con. It's a rather long trip for me, though, and I don't fly from US airports. We'll see.
I read this and I frankly wonder if we're looking at the same reality. Chaos Horizon did an in-depth analysis of the voting data. Scrolling down towards the bottom, one finds that "Core Rabid Puppies: 550-525 (9.2% - 8.9%, using 5950 total votes for percentage) Core Sad Puppies: 500-400 (8.4% - 6.7%, using 5950 total votes for percentage)."
This is consistent with the 9.5% nomination-stage voting. In short, Sad & Rabid are not a majority, but a small minority of fandom. To say the Puppies recruited "thousands" of people is simply wrong. They recruited in total maybe a thousand. The "alphas" of SF recruited over 4,000.
The small Puppy minority nominated a slate of mediocre (at best) works, which caused this Hugo voter to No Award a lot of the ballot. (You can look at my Hugo voting here.) If, as a Hugo voter, one thinks none or most of the works nominated are not worthy of a Hugo, then the only option (and one explicitly allowed in the rules) is to vote No Award. This does not "prove" conspiracy or corruption, unless you
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First point: Do not use scare quotes in my comments section. Period.
The total number of Puppy supporters is greater than the number of Puppies who nominated, I'd say by two to one. Winning the Hugos was not the core mission of the Puppies. Expanding the nominating/voting base was. The base got expanded. Burning the awards down didn't change that.
The Insider Alphas really are alphas in the tribal sense, in that they tell the lower-ranked tribe members what to do, and those members do what they are told. There were plenty of posts encouraging people to vote No Award for anything present on the Puppy lists, whether people had read them or not. There were online guides instructing people how to do this. I consider this unsurprising, given the tribal nature of fandom. The No Award sweep was not a judgment based on the quality of the stories. It was a directive handed down from On High.
Scalzi is very thick with Tor insiders. Redshirts was at best a so-so novel, basically fanfic, or maybe (being charitable) a sendup of fanfic. (I
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So am I an Insider Alpha or a lower-ranked tribal member who does what I am told? Personally, I think I'm neither - I think I am just a fan who, when handed a slate of crappy writing, voted on it accordingly.
I No Awarded the entire Best Related category, and No Award was very high in my ballot on a number of other categories. I felt that the more serious harm to the Hugos would come from awarding a Hugo to crap writing as opposed to simply not awarding a Hugo. Kevin Standlee's online guide was posted because he was asked by multiple people to explain how No Award worked.
I can tell you exactly how Redshirts won the Hugo - it was a very popular work, and appeared in 2nd or 3rd place on a lot of ballots (like mine, I think). Since there was no clear front-runner that year, the consensus candidate won. I can assure you the only person who asked for me to vote for Redshirts was Scalzi, via his blog. If any logs were rolled, they weren't rolled around me
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"Robert?" That's just too good. I hadn't known the puppies had names until now. I may be giggling about this all day--especially about Robert, snerk.
I hadn't been paying much attention (after a period of paying far too much attention) to the whole mess for a while. It's been good for giggles, if nothing else. I've been reading Correia's stuff for a while; he writes one hell of a roller coaster ride. Perhaps I'll look into some of the other conspirators' works.
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Core Sad Puppies: 500-400 (8.4% - 6.7%, using 5950 total votes for percentage)."
This is consistent with the 9.5% nomination-stage voting. In short, Sad & Rabid are not a majority, but a small minority of fandom. To say the Puppies recruited "thousands" of people is simply wrong. They recruited in total maybe a thousand. The "alphas" of SF recruited over 4,000.
The small Puppy minority nominated a slate of mediocre (at best) works, which caused this Hugo voter to No Award a lot of the ballot. (You can look at my Hugo voting here.) If, as a Hugo voter, one thinks none or most of the works nominated are not worthy of a Hugo, then the only option (and one explicitly allowed in the rules) is to vote No Award. This does not "prove" conspiracy or corruption, unless you ( ... )
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The total number of Puppy supporters is greater than the number of Puppies who nominated, I'd say by two to one. Winning the Hugos was not the core mission of the Puppies. Expanding the nominating/voting base was. The base got expanded. Burning the awards down didn't change that.
The Insider Alphas really are alphas in the tribal sense, in that they tell the lower-ranked tribe members what to do, and those members do what they are told. There were plenty of posts encouraging people to vote No Award for anything present on the Puppy lists, whether people had read them or not. There were online guides instructing people how to do this. I consider this unsurprising, given the tribal nature of fandom. The No Award sweep was not a judgment based on the quality of the stories. It was a directive handed down from On High.
Scalzi is very thick with Tor insiders. Redshirts was at best a so-so novel, basically fanfic, or maybe (being charitable) a sendup of fanfic. (I ( ... )
Reply
So am I an Insider Alpha or a lower-ranked tribal member who does what I am told? Personally, I think I'm neither - I think I am just a fan who, when handed a slate of crappy writing, voted on it accordingly.
I No Awarded the entire Best Related category, and No Award was very high in my ballot on a number of other categories. I felt that the more serious harm to the Hugos would come from awarding a Hugo to crap writing as opposed to simply not awarding a Hugo. Kevin Standlee's online guide was posted because he was asked by multiple people to explain how No Award worked.
I can tell you exactly how Redshirts won the Hugo - it was a very popular work, and appeared in 2nd or 3rd place on a lot of ballots (like mine, I think). Since there was no clear front-runner that year, the consensus candidate won. I can assure you the only person who asked for me to vote for Redshirts was Scalzi, via his blog. If any logs were rolled, they weren't rolled around me ( ... )
Reply
I hadn't been paying much attention (after a period of paying far too much attention) to the whole mess for a while. It's been good for giggles, if nothing else. I've been reading Correia's stuff for a while; he writes one hell of a roller coaster ride. Perhaps I'll look into some of the other conspirators' works.
Reply
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